The Wolf Witch (The Keys Trilogy Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

down on the futon. “The shrine, I mean. It was just another shade of gray against the lawn.”
    Gabe sat down beside him, his gaze drawn back to the mismatched socks. “That sucks. I’m sorry.”
    “Meh. You don’t miss what you never had, I guess.”
    “You could see some colors before.”
    “Not many.” Joe swallowed a yawn. “What did Charmaine want?”
    “The restaurant bathrooms. Smells like death, apparently.”
    Joe leaned back and groaned. “Jesus,” he said. “Again? I’ll bet you anything it’s the ladies room. Don’t they tell them not to flush tampons?”
    “Sure. There are special trashcans and everything.”
    “Then why don’t they fucking use them?”
    “I have no idea.”
    A fly buzzed lazily round and round above the kitchen sink. They both stared at it for a while, Gabe thinking of Gloria’s place and how lately it had started to look more than just a little neglected. And she had been so house-proud once; scrubbing the linoleum on her hands and knees, lining the bottoms of drawers with scented paper.
    “Did they get that new maid?” asked Joe.
    “Huh? Who? For Gloria?”
    “No. At the hotel.”
    “Oh, right,” said Gabe. “Yeah. Started today, I think.”
    “So?”
    “So what?”
    “So is she hot?”
    Gabe had only caught a glimpse of the girl, walking across the grass, cleaning supplies in hand. Slender, dark skinned, her hair tied up in a big frizzy ponytail at her nape. “I don’t know,” he said, half his mind still on Gloria. “She’s young, I guess.”
    “That’s a start. Considering the rest of the housekeeping staff consists of two grandmas and a lesbian.”
    This was assuming the new maid was on fire to get with a lanky, sunburned Minnesota plumber who spent his days obsessing about damp and yanking rotten tampons out of U-bends in the ladies’ bathrooms. Gabe almost hoped not. For her sake.
    Joe’s thigh was warm against his, but the fly above the sink kept on buzzing in the same old infuriating circle, reminding Gabe that there was a problem still unsolved here. “Can you sit with Gloria tomorrow night?” he said.
    “Yeah. Why?”
    “I think I’m gonna go up to Tavernier. Talk to Eli about the situation.”
    Joe raised an eyebrow. “Why? What do you think he’s going to do about it?”
    “I don’t know. Something.”
    “Nothing would be more likely.”
    “I know that,” said Gabe. “But you know me. I’m an optimist deep down.”
    Joe patted his knee. “Yeah. You should get that looked at.”
    *
    Blue slept - or tried to – in the attic of the hotel.
    The notion of live-in staff had lost its old world refinement almost immediately. The AC unit was cranky and the waitress next door had not only a genius for smuggling boys upstairs but a loud repertoire of screamy sex noises probably borrowed from porn. Blue suspected that the management had also been similarly disappointed when they added beds and baths in the hope of drawing a better class of staff. Already she had noticed that there was something about the Keys, some strange quality that attracted rare birds like Gloria.
    In New Orleans Blue had always been aware of the odd suction effect that the Gulf Coast winds sometimes had, blowing into town the exotic, the dangerous and the just plain weird. She had imagined the Keys populated with the kind of well-read, well-heeled tourists in search of whiskey sours and the ghost of Hemingway, but instead she had found the same effect was in action here. It was like all the world’s flotsam and jetsam got caught in the teeth of the coral reefs, and it actually wasn’t so bad, being just another thing that floated on down. In fact, once you’d been adrift the way Blue always had, it was something like a welcome respite. You might find yourself snagged in fishing nets, itchy with sand and smelling like a week old mackerel, but at least you got to come to a stop .
    She lay listening to the steady shh of the ocean and the faint, fleshy sound of palm