The Philadelphia Quarry Read Online Free PDF Page A

although you’d never find that out from her. So I could imagine her intervening on Lewis’s behalf, to no avail.
    “Harper was a good man, but he was stubborn,” she says, and takes another sip.
    “But it seemed like they got, you know, diminishing returns with those kids. The other two started out like Lewis, the apple of everybody’s eye. Wes and Alicia were adorable. Everybody said so, not just me.”
    I ask her if she thought it was the rape that changed her.
    Clara thinks about it a minute. I try not to hear her breathing with the help of her little friend.
    “No,” she says. “I think there was something odd about her before that. She had a way of zoning out. You’d be talking to her, and then you’d see that she wasn’t really there.
    “And, by then, they were already having trouble with Wesley.”
    Coming from the West End, where girls wind up with androgynous, family-heirloom names as often as not, Wesley could have been the third sister.
    “Oh, no,” Clara says, laughing. “Wesley was all boy. He was the apple of Harper and Simone’s eyes. Before he . . . well, before he lost his mind, I suppose you’d say.”
    He was fifteen, a straight-A student and already a starter on the lacrosse team as a freshman, popular and handsome.
    “And then, he came home from school one day and told them he couldn’t go back. Just like that.”
    Clara snaps her fingers.
    “He went to a ‘special’ school somewhere up in the valley, and then he came back and lived with them, but from then on, he was in and out of different kinds of homes. I saw him at Simone’s funeral, last year, and I meant to speak to him, if he even still knows me. But then he disappeared. I suppose Lewis and her husband look after him now, if anybody does.”
    Clara shakes her head. I need to go, just to keep her from talking. It’s pretty obvious that the oxygen tank is having trouble keeping up.
    “I always felt bad about it all, felt bad that I couldn’t help Wesley in some way. You know, I was his godmother.”
    I have one hand on the ottoman to push myself up when she says it. I stop.
    “Oh, I know,” Clara says, laughing and wheezing a little. “I buried my lede.”
    Clara never forgets anything, including old newspaper jargon. I told her about burying ledes one time when she’d spun some fifteen-minute yarn about a run-down home she was trying to help save near the VCU campus before finally mentioning that she and her late husband had reared three kids there.
    “I’ve left him something in my will. Maybe it’ll keep him independent for a few more years.”
    But after that day when he told them he couldn’t go back to school, Clara rarely ever saw him.
    “I think there was some sense of shame. They diagnosed it as schizophrenia, but neither Harper nor Simone would talk about it, even with me. They’d just change the subject, and after a while, you just stopped asking. And I never tried as hard as I might have to stay in touch with him, later.”
    The general feeling, Clara said, was that “losing” his beloved son, and then the rape of his youngest daughter three years later, contributed greatly to Harper Simpson’s fatal heart attack when he wasn’t yet sixty.
    “That’s all hooey, of course. What caused Harper Simpson’s heart to quit was too much Smithfield ham and too many Marlboros.”
    I make sure she’s OK and take my leave.
    “Come back anytime,” she says, walking me slowly to the door, which only wears her out and delays my parting a couple of minutes.
    Feldman, a.k.a. Mr. McGrumpy, the Prestwould’s resident busybody (although he has plenty of competition), is in the lobby when I come down.
    “Ah,” he says, “and how is Clara today?”
    He loves to do that shit. He saw the elevator go up to twelve and then come down, depositing me in the lobby. The only other unit on twelve is unoccupied.
    I tell him she’s fine and congratulate him on his skills as a snoop. I’d like to throttle him sometimes,