The Touch of Treason Read Online Free PDF

Side combat zone. I don’t want to tempt fate.”
    What he meant, of course, was that he had to be in class in the morning, as the others did not. He offered Ed Porter a ride. Ed said it was too early.
    Less than an hour after Barry’s departure, Leona closed the discussion. “It’s midnight. Martin must get his sleep. You know how early he rises.”
    She knew that Melissa and Scott would use the lateness of the hour to take advantage of the standing offer of the upstairs bedrooms, in which, over the years, dozens of late-staying students had camped for the night. Ed Porter had missed the last train and he didn’t have a car. So when Leona Fuller made her ritual offer of an upstairs bedroom, he, too, accepted with a show of reluctance, as if he had not in fact done so a dozen times within the last month. Ed cut the grass without being asked. He had combed Sniffer’s coat. He split wood for winter.
    Within fifteen minutes, the house was quiet. Leona, sliding into the huge bed in the large room at the rear of the house, remembered when Martin told her that lovemaking robbed him of some fraction of his intellectual vitality the morning after, that he would absent himself from the temptation by sleeping in a separate bedroom. That was thirty years ago and she had not believed his reason. When she saw him with Tarasova, both so aggressively pretending to be merely infatuated with each other’s brains, she told herself that like a kidney stone, it too would pass. But the memory remained. Leona put her arms around her second pillow. You get used to anything in time.
    In the morning, at first light, Martin Fuller opened his eyes. Immediately his thought was on the work at the point he had left off on the preceding day when he stowed his manuscript in the safe. Daily life was an impediment, showering, dressing, breakfasting. His body, he sometimes thought, was too elaborate a machine for housing his brain, required too much attention. He put his heavy robe around his cold frame and headed for his bathroom down the hall.
    The bath off Leona’s bedroom was far more elaborate and spacious than the one he called his own. But this way he could keep the kerosene heater in place since no one else used his bathroom and only he felt the chill before the steam from the shower warmed the room.
    He turned the hot water on in the shower stall. It usually had to run a full minute before the tepid water in the pipes was pushed out of the showerhead to make room for the hot water from the basement tank.
    He bent to turn the knob on the kerosene heater. As every morning, he took the packet of matches he kept in the bathroom cabinet, struck one on the back of the pack, and touched it to the proper place in the heater. Suddenly, the heater, which he always thought of as an accomplice against the morning cold, roared forth with a ball of flame that engulfed him. The floor-length robe was transformed instantly into a torch, and as Martin Fuller screamed from within the incendiary mass, he had the presence of mind to unlock the door so help could reach him, thinking the one word: they.
    *
    Leona Fuller had heard Martin going down the hall, of course, but as usual picked up a book to read in bed so that Martin would continue to believe she was still asleep. Human contact before he got to work always interfered. He awoke thinking of the next paragraph he would write: the precise formation of his thought would take shape while he sipped at his orange juice and spooned the cereal into his mouth. It was his habit to take his coffee with him into his study, holding the cup carefully in his left hand as with his right he unlocked the door with the key that never left his possession.
    She heard the loud vroom a moment before Martin’s terrible cry. Her first thought was that something had made Martin fall. He’d broken his hip three years earlier when he’d slipped from the library ladder while trying to get a book from a high shelf, and she imagined him