The Joy of Killing Read Online Free PDF

over the years the train ride has come to mean a good deal more to me than my first wife, and, although you can never be sure, I think it’s been immune to the ravages of time and experience. The girl’s lovely face is as smooth and flawless as Chinese porcelain. There’s little to do about the intrusion, except to let it run its course and try to hold onto some slender thread of consciousness in the meantime.
    I PUSH MY chair back and stand. I feel a draft rising from under the door and listen closely for the rattling sounds. I walk around the desk to the window, hoping that this slight change of atmosphere will allow space for the girl on the train to reemerge and for us to continue our drama unalloyed. The oval-shaped window,framed in wood, grows larger as I approach. Through it I see the moon, now lit with fire, has reached the middle of the sky, halfway between the top of the world and the icy waters below. The branches of the tall oak are motionless. I remember the follies of the wind here: from a dead stillness to a raging gale in a couple of breaths. The garden wall, constructed over a century ago of lake rock, casts a shadow over the garden. Just beyond the wall, out of view, is a cliff, and thirty yards below that lays a necklace of sharp rocks barely submerged in the black water. The lake itself is so large there is no distant shoreline. In summer storms, sailing boats overturned and people drowned. Our parents rented this house every August for all the summers of my youth. In my old room, one floor below where I’m standing, I’d found the gooseneck lamp on the same table where it had always been. My chair by the window where I used to sit and watch the moon rise was gone.
    Our father always reminded us first thing on arriving here that we were never to climb the wall or play on the cliff or on the rocks below it. So we took our lunch sacks and fishing poles and walked a quarter mile down the dirt road to a bay, where a river ran into the lake and formed a small beach.
    Back then, the door to this room, at the bottom of the stairs, was always locked, as was the door to the cellar. We never knew where the people who lived here went in the summer, or what they thought of us, the family who took over their house every August and sat at their table and slept in their beds and used their toilets. The house has been vacant and unused for years, I overheard today at the little grocery in town. Too run down, too costly to fix upnow. I found my way to the place just as daylight was beginning to fade, after visiting the bay down the road, where I saw that the rope we rode out over the river had been taken down, although you could still see the groove carved in the sturdy tree limb arched over the water. The north woods lake water was cold as ice, even in August, although it didn’t seem to bother us, or if it did we didn’t let it show. First one in. Last one out. The trick on the rope swing was to let go at the very peak, so you flew as far and high as possible, but still managed to land short of the submerged branches on the opposite bank. I zero in on the face of the boy as he approaches the rope swing for a flicker of knowing. I see nothing. From the looks of him, approaching six feet, butch cut, ribs sticking out, gold ring with a glass ruby on his right hand, this is about a year before the girl on the train, and a couple years after the detectives. And yet not a glimmer, not here, in the warm summer sun. Hour after hour we played, until our father came to fetch us home. It was moments like this, when you look back closely and don’t see confirming details, that you began to doubt the whole story and think maybe it was another conglomeration that your mind had served up and you had come to accept through time and repetition. But not the fedoras, or the girl on the train; I would swear to death by either one. I could hear right now the dull thrumming of the detective’s voice as he