The Blood Red Indian Summer Read Online Free PDF Page A

giving inner-city schoolkids a chance. His dad taught Algebra at Boys and Girls High in Brooklyn. His mom served as school librarian at the Eleanor Roosevelt Middle School in Washington Heights. They raised Mitch in a two-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment in Stuyvesant Town. Scrimped and saved so he could attend Columbia. Took their pensions when they were sixty-two, and were now enjoying the Florida retirement they so richly deserved. In fact, this would be the first time they’d been back to New York in over a year. They were staying in Mitch’s apartment on West 102 Street for a couple of days and coming out to Dorset tomorrow. He’d booked them a nice room at the Frederick House Inn.
    I love my Des. I love my parents. Why am I freaking out?
    It wasn’t as if they didn’t know she was a Connecticut state trooper who knew at least eighteen different ways to kill a man with her bare hands. Or that she wasn’t Jewish. Mitch’s beloved wife, Maisie, who’d died of ovarian cancer, hadn’t been Jewish either. But, well, she had been white. And there was no way tomorrow night’s real-life version of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? wasn’t going to be tense.
    Not that Chet and Ruth had flown north solely to meet Des. They also had a couple of “appointments” to take care of in the city. “Appointments” that they’d been stubbornly tight-lipped about when Mitch tried to press for details over the phone. As in, perhaps one of them was in town to see a specialist regarding a grapefruit-sized tumor. Then again, perhaps Mitch was just a bit spooked. After losing Maisie he had every reason to be. Not to mention what Des had just gone through with the Deacon. One day, he was fine. The next day he was on the operating table having quadruple-bypass surgery. That was how these things happened when they happened. Bam . You never saw them coming.
    Slowly, the traffic crept its way near Stalag Grantham, with its eight-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire and festooned with KEEP OUT signs. All it needed was guard towers manned by helmeted storm troopers. Outside of Da Beast’s front gate the news crews and paparazzi were jabbering and jostling like a slavering mob at a freak show. Which, in fact, was what they were.
    Finally, Mitch was able to inch close enough so that he could pull into the long gravel driveway that belonged to Da Beast’s neighbors, Luanne and Lila Joshua, a pair of wifty spinsters in their sixties. The Joshuas were one of Dorset’s most distinguished founding families. Old, old money. Not that you’d know it by the condition of their place. The tall weeds in the rutted driveway brushed the undercarriage of Mitch’s truck as he bumped his way toward their three-story center-chimney mansion, which dated back to the early 1700s and, you’d swear, hadn’t been cared for since. It was a moldering wreck with broken windowpanes, missing roof shingles, peeling paint, rotting door frames, rotting sills, rotting everything. It was sad to see what had happened to such a fine old colonial showplace. But the Joshua sisters happened to be penniless due to a toxic combination of poor investments, soaring property taxes and almost no income beyond the monthly Social Security check that their beloved seventy-two-year-old brother-in-law, Winston, received. The three of them would be starving if it weren’t for the Food Pantry deliveries Mitch made three times a week. And the rent money they were receiving from their boarder, Callie Kreutzer, an art student at the renowned Dorset Academy. Mitch had a hand in that, too. Callie’s mom, an art critic, was tight with Lacy, his editor.
    Callie’s bicycle was parked by the sagging front porch. So was the sisters’ ancient blue Peugeot station wagon. Winston’s vintage MGTD ragtop was parked there, too, though it no longer ran.
    Which was just as well. Winston, who’d been married to Luanne and Lila’s late sister Lorelei, was in no condition to drive it or any