The Shadow Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

fearful that the fish would not keep.
    She decided that she could cook the fish in the morning and have it for the next day’s lunch.
    The cat had followed her and meowed. The noise irritated her.
    ‘All right. All right. Coming.’
    She opened a can of cat food. Manipulating the opener was difficult for her, and her hand stung with sudden soreness. She told herself to march down to the discount hardware store in the morning and purchase an electric opener. She set the food out for the cat and left it eating.
    In her bedroom, she stared at the picture of her late husband.
    ‘You should be here,’ she said, reproaching him. ‘You had no right to leave me alone.’
    Sophie Millstein marched back into the small living room and sat down again. She felt abruptly as if she were caught out on the street in the moments before a thunderstorm crashed down, when impetuous, sharp surgical gusts of wind sliced through the humid stillness, assaulting her from all sides.
    ‘I’m tired,’ she said out loud. ‘I should take a pill and go to bed.’
    But instead she rose, tramped into the kitchen, seized the telephone and dialed her son’s number on Long Island. She let the phone ring once before hanging it up, instantly deciding that she didn’t want to speak with her only child. He will just insist again that I move out into some old people’s home where I don’t know a soul, she told herself. This is my home.
    Sophie Millstein went to the tap, filled a glass with water and took a long drink. It tasted brackish, metallic. She made a face. ‘Miami Beach special,’ she said. She wished she’d remembered to purchase some bottled water at the store. She poured some back in the sink, then took the
    remainder in and filled up the water container in the bird
    cage. The parakeet chirped once or twice. She wondered
    briefly why she’d never bothered to name the bird, as she
    had her cat. She wondered if this was somehow unfair,
    then doubted it, and returned to the kitchen to rinse out
    her glass and place it on the drying rack. There was a small
    window above the sink, and she glanced out into the night.
    She told herself that she was familiar with every shape and
    shadow that she could see; everything was in exactly the
    same spot that it had been the night before and the night
    before that and every night for more than ten years. Still,
    she continued to examine the darkness, watching each
    corner of the backyard for movement, like a sentry on
    patrol.
    She turned off the faucet and listened. There were a few distant sounds of traffic. Upstairs, Finkel was shuffling about. A television was on too loud;
    that would be the Kadoshes, she thought, because they are too stubborn to turn up their hearing aids. She continued to look out the window. She let her eyes
    read each shaft of light, study each dark spot. For a moment she was astonished at the number of places she thought someone could hide without being seen: the corner where the orange tree lurked next to the old chain-link fence; the shadow where the garbage cans were
    placed.
    No, she told herself, it is all as it always is. Nothing different. Nothing out of place.
    ŚShe breathed in hard and went back to the living room.
    Television, she told herself. She flicked on her set and
    settled into a chair. A situation comedy was on, and for a
    few minutes she tried to follow the jokes, and forced
    herself to laugh at the same moments that the canned
    laughter did. She let her head drift down into her hands, and as the program continued in front of her, she shivered, as if cold, but she knew that wasn’t the reason.
    He’s dead, she said to herself. He’s not here.
    She wondered, for a moment, whether he had ever really existed. Who was that I saw? she asked herself. It could have been anybody, especially with that hat pulled down over his forehead and the dark overcoat. And they shut the door so quickly after he yelled, I hardly had a chance to
    see.
    But she knew this was