The Quick & the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

daughter missing?” Alice asked. Although, of course, she could hardly care if she was.
    “Why, no,” the man said, laughing. “I don’t believe so. My name is Carter Vineyard, and my daughter and I just moved here. She doesn’t know anyone. I thought someone her own age could give her a call.”
    Alice looked at him. He was sophisticated-looking and sincere and had to be desperate, a little stupid, or intoxicated.
    “You’re about sixteen, aren’t you?” Carter said. “Go to school?”
    “The Marquise School,” Alice said. “But it’s almost over. A few more weeks.”
    “The Marquise School is where Annabel’s going in the fall!” he exclaimed. “Isn’t that a coincidence! It’s an excellent school, isn’t it?”
    “Function in disaster. Finish in style,” Alice said.
    “Pardon?”
    “The maxims of Marquise.”
    “Oh yes, indeed. Good,” Carter said.
    “The place is pretty vacuous, actually.”
    “Oh well, that’s all right too, for a while, when you’re young. You’ve got the energy to handle it. It’s when you get older that vacuousness can really lay you low.” He realized he sounded somewhat disoriented, buthe was still puzzling over the maxims. They sounded good, but weren’t they a bit terminal for an expensive boarding school?
    “What’s she like?” Alice asked.
    “Who?”
    “Your daughter.”
    Carter seemed unprepared for this question. “She’s nice,” he said. “Annabel is very nice. I have a picture of her.” He took a wallet from his pocket.
    Alice looked. “You can’t tell much from a picture,” she said, giving this girl the benefit of the doubt. “Who’s this?” She pointed to another photograph of a woman in a tight white evening dress, laughing.
    “That’s my wife,” Carter said. “That’s Annabel’s mother. She’s dead.”
    “That proves my point exactly,” Alice said excitedly. “Pictures, wow, there’s no inkling in them of what’s going to happen next.”
    “Hmmm,” Carter said.
    Alice feared she’d hurt his feelings. “Well, she was happy then, anyway,” she said.
    Carter put his wallet away. It was true that Ginger had been happy when that picture had been taken; she had been elated. Less than an hour later, still elated, she had demolished four cars in valet parking at a penalty of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. (“If he thinks he has the only keys to our Mercedes, Carter, he’s a fool. I would never have given that boy the only keys to the Mercedes.”)
    “Give me Annabel’s number and I’ll call her,” Alice said, for the man seemed to have misplaced the reason he’d approached her in the first place.
    Carter’s face twitched. “Yes. Terrific.” He extracted a pen and paper from his jacket in the elegant way some men have of producing these humble instruments.
    “Do you have another girlfriend you could bring along?”
    “I wouldn’t right away,” Alice said cautiously. Maybe a rapprochement with life could be made possible for Corvus by employing this Annabel person, or maybe not.
    “I’m just wondering if I should find someone else as well. I was determined to do something about this today, get Annabel started.” He gave a happy sigh. “I like it out here. People seem accessible.”
    He was a little nuts, Alice thought. She kind of liked him.
    Outside, the
Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets
person was crouched sobbing, in handcuffs, while a policeman watched her warily. “A work of reference ain’t worth this, lady,” he said.

    Alice called Annabel and was immediately invited over to her house. It was in the foothills with a big pool and the city below and nothing behind but the hard, folded mountains still trying to conceal what they knew. The first impression Alice had of Annabel was that she was exceptionally tan. Annabel said her mother used to be able to tan like that, she loved tanning practically more than anything, but when she was forty-two, her skin stopped providing that service.