The Isle of Youth: Stories Read Online Free PDF

postcards in the mail. They were part of a set. I’d seen a similar kind of thing in a party store once; if I had all the cards they would fit together like a puzzle. So far, I’d received two swatches of sky, a cloud, a dried-out river, and a brown ledge. There was nothing on the back except my name and Julia’s address. Everything was typed, the letters large and a little smudged, as though it had been done on an old typewriter. The postmarks were from Arizona, Utah, Nevada. I had never seen my husband use a typewriter, but he had always wanted to travel west. He thought Florida was a miserable swamp. And he knew Julia’s would be the first place I’d turn. Once, I spread the cards out on the floor and tried to put them in order. I didn’t have enough pieces to make sense of what they were supposed to be.
    When Mrs. Defonte began singing, my hands dropped into my lap. My chin rose, as though pulled by a string. Each note was as perfect as the crystal goblets I’d noticed on her dining room table. The other actors on stage gazed at her with the same kind of wonder. When she finished, they all applauded. One person rose from her seat. Mrs. Defonte looked around, startled, like she’d just come out of a trance. A voice like that was a weapon.
    *   *   *
    By ten o’clock, we’d been on the roof for seven hours. The darkness had brought little relief from the heat. We’d used up all the ice cubes, eaten the bologna sandwiches I’d packed, drunk a beer apiece. Over the last two weeks, we had observed Mr. Defonte entering hotels, high-end places near his office, and exiting after an hour; it was always the same days of the week, the same times. Fifteen minutes after he left, the same blond woman always emerged. From the blonde’s photo and license plate number, we located her address and tracked Mr. Defonte to her high-rise on Royal Palm Avenue. The first time we followed him to her building, it was observational; this time, we were prepared to document. Catching him going in and out of her residence was significant to our case. The hotel meetings could, with some effort, be explained away. He was a lawyer, after all. He could say he was meeting clients, that the blonde’s presence was a coincidence. Spending seven-plus hours in her building, however, would be harder to dismiss.
    When it was my turn to watch the door, Julia stretched out on one of the white plastic beach chairs behind me. The chairs had mildew on them, which we hoped meant the roof deck didn’t get much use. If anyone discovered us, Julia planned to tell them we were police. Before starting Winslow & Co., we enrolled in an online detective school. We learned how to take fingerprints and write reports, how to run credit and background checks, how to do surveillance and skip tracing. I liked the school; it made everything seem official. At the end, there was a certificate. Julia was less interested, so I did most of the work for our classes. One thing we were never supposed to do was impersonate a police officer.
    Around midnight, the conversation turned to our father.
    “Here’s a story,” I said to Julia.
    Once, my father told me a story about a business trip to Chicago with his friend Bill Keller. At a bar, Bill picked up two prostitutes. They were young, with accents and fake fur coats. They all went back to a hotel, an old grand place called the Iron Horse. My father and Bill disappeared into separate rooms, but instead of doing what one would normally do with a prostitute, of doing what Bill Keller was doing in that very same moment, my father said they lay down on his bed and he read to her.
    “Read what?” I’d asked.
    “A novel,” my father had said.
    I was eleven. The story made me feel strange. It seemed to come out of nowhere. We were eating lunch at Bojangles’. The Kingsmen were playing on the radio. I knew what a prostitute was, but I didn’t yet understand how unusual it was to not do what one normally does with a