The Last Good Day Read Online Free PDF Page B

when you can, and stop on a dime when somebody needs a ride to the doctor or to piano lessons.
    But just in the last two weeks, she’d lost some of that elasticity. As soon as she saw the buildings collapse, she froze, not daring to move from the phone until Barry called to say he was all right. Even now, she found herself tensing up for no good reason and wanting time to stand still. No, not just stand still. She wanted it to go backward. She wanted Mr. DiGamba’s dry cleaning back on the corner of River and Prospect. She wanted the old bowling alley back around the corner, where the new police station had taken its place. She wanted the high school teachers she sometimes ran into at the mall to be the age they were when she was a sophomore.
    She passed another young cop directing traffic in front of the train station, ignoring his calls for her to stop. When did they start hiring people who weren’t even born when “My Sharona” was a hit?
    Two burly ME’s assistants were just coming down the steps from the platform, carrying a stretcher with a white sheet belted over the unmistakable shape of a body.
    She froze just outside the parking lot entrance. The outline under the sheet was too short for a full-grown adult. Not Barry or any of their friends who take the train. But then her hand went up to her throat, and she found herself praying that it wasn’t a dead child.
    “Hey, lady, no pictures.”
    A brutish commanding voice snapped her to attention. She looked around, seeing rows of Explorers and Navigators with parking permits and flags in the windows, shiny expensive machines with no one to operate them.
    “I said get the fuck outa here.” A glowering man in a yellow sports shirt was coming down the steps after the body, a gold detective’s shield twisting and untwisting on a chain around his neck. “There’s no press allowed.”
    “I’m not press.” She put a hand over her Canon. “And I wasn’t taking any pictures.”
    “Oh, shit, what are you doing here?”
    Something in Michael Fallon’s face seemed to draw back, gather force, and then come out again. Lynn found herself stepping away a little, as if she were too close to a swinging door.
    The last real conversation they’d had was probably twenty-five years ago. She was caught between relief at seeing him up close after months of ducking behind cars in the Stop & Shop parking lot and dread at hearing what he finally had to say.
    Time had been more than fair to him. The short military buzz cut that looked so jarring and defiant in the seventies was actually fashionable these days. His face had lost some of the roundness that led boys to call him Baby Huey behind his back. Instead, there were more of the contours that made some girls privately admit that yes, the man certainly had his angles. But the wary blue eyes had receded even deeper under the ridge of his brow. Hobo eyes, she used to think. Like he was watching life from inside a boxcar.
    “I was just taking pictures of the guys around the corner, and I came over when I saw all this commotion.” She looked back down the block, wondering what had become of George and the other day laborers. “So, what’s going on?”
    “Ah, bunch of crap,” he said, settling into a voice a half-octave deeper than she remembered. “We think somebody might have fallen off a boat and drowned around here. Just our luck she washed up onto the bank.”
    “Getting kind of late in the year to be boating, isn’t it?”
    “I don’t know. It’s been warm. I still haven’t pulled my dinghy out of the water.”
    They both watched as the men carefully started to load the stretcher into the back of the van.
    “So this is something, running into you like this.”
    “Isn’t it?” he said lightly, as if it had only been two weeks.
    “I’d heard you’d moved to Arizona a few years ago.”
    “Yeah, I tried highway patrol in Scottsdale, but I never really took to it. Hard to get used to the desert after you grow