The True Detective Read Online Free PDF

silver gray 1975 Pontiac Sunbird.

CHAPTER 3
    K ATHLEEN M OREAU ! E RIC THINKS . Y ES — YES , K ATHLEEN Moreau! She is so small and shy. She sits on the edge of class and never in the middle. Just like someone else he knows, he thinks.And she has looked at him. Leaving the building, on sidewalk and stairway, across their busy room and in turns at the board, glances have slipped from her small dark eyes like folded notes. Gee, he thinks. They could end up getting married. Talk about going off the deep end.
    A girl, he thinks. It’s so strange that on the slightest attention from a girl he’d find himself sidetracked like this. A Navy Seal turning to mush, all at the hands of one of those puzzles with brains and long hair.
    Her small ankles, though, and the shanks of her legs. There is her profile, too—around the side of which her glances seem to click —and the small bones of her shoulders like seashells within her blouses and sweaters.
    Out of control. Kathleen Moreau.
    He rolls over. Well, it could be somebody else, he is telling himself when, suddenly, the bottom of his foot is kicked, hard, and hurts at once. “Hey!” he cries out.
    Matthew, standing over him, slaps his head as he tries to pull away, as Eric cries, “What’re you doing?”
    “See you got a valentine from Frieda,” Matthew says.
    It’s an old line of teasing. Not the previous summer, but the summer before that, at an outdoor camp, girls from a neighboring camp visited one afternoon for field events and a marshmallow roast, and a young girl named Frieda was said to “like” Eric because he was “nice.” The girl lost a bracelet, and Eric, taking on a search—any search challenged something in him—found the bracelet and returned it to her. When the boys in turn visited the girls a day later, the girl invited Eric, within his brother’s hearing, to play shuffleboard, and the teasing, launched by Matthew’s raised brow at the time, had never quite ceased.
    “Mom,” Matthew is calling out. “See the valentine Rockport got from Frieda.”
    Making a face at his brother, Eric tries a new tack. “Neat, ain’t it,” he says.
    All at once, but harder, Matthew backhand slaps Eric’s head. Stung, tears starting, Eric whips his foot around in a kick at his brother’s shin and misses.
    The fight—and Eric’s tears—are under way. Matthew kicks a foot, smashing Eric’s ribs under his arm as he tries to twist to the side. The fight is real, but there is their mother, shouting at them, “Stop it! Both of you! Stop it right now!”
    “What a jerk he is,” Matthew says.
    “No more!” Claire says. “Eric, my gosh, will you get these cars out of the way!”
    Stung again—what did his cars have to do with anything?—Eric picks up one car and then another, and tosses them into the shoe box. He would cry out that he hasn’t done anything, but it doesn’t seem to matter this morning.
    “I won’t have any more teasing from you,” his mother is saying to his brother. “Certainly not because a girl sent your brother a valentine.”
    “Oh, Mom, nobody sent me anything,” Eric cries.
    “Well who did what then? What’s this all about?”
    “He’s such a dope,” Matthew says. “Stupid card’s from his teacher. Why’d you even bring it home, you dumb jerk?”
    “Up yours!” Eric wails. “You think you’re God or something?”
    “Enough!” Claire says. “Not another word from either of you.”
    Shoving his shoe box of cars and soldiers under the TV table, Eric feels his heart is sinking away. His teacher? What an idiot he is, he says to himself. His teacher! Mrs. Ackman?
    Going along the short hallway, he locks himself in the bathroom and stands with his back to the doorknob. How could anybody be so dumb? he thinks.
    He sits on the stool cover in a slump, too disappointed with himself to cry. He hopes his brother will try the locked door, in which case he will say he isn’t through yet, which answer he will give for two hours