The Wrong Man Read Online Free PDF

answered. “And one that should be answered. But you would be unwise to think that Ashley, despite her many strong qualities, was properly equipped to deal with the sorts of problems that Michael O’Connell presented.”
    “True enough. But what did she think she was involved in?”
    “Theater,” she replied. “But she just did not know what sort of production it might be.”

3
    A Young Woman of Ordinary Ignorance
    T wo tables away from where Ashley Freeman sat with a trio of friends, a half dozen members of the Northeastern University varsity baseball team were hotly arguing the relative virtues of either the Yankees or the Red Sox, engaged in a loud, frequently foulmouthed assessment of each team. Ashley might have been perturbed by the over-the-top noise, except that having spent many hours in student-oriented bars over her four academic years in Boston, she had heard the debate a multitude of times. Occasionally it ended in some pushing or maybe a quick exchange of blows, but more often just gave way to cascading torrents of obscenities. Often there were fairly creative suppositions about the bizarre off-hours sexual practices of the players on either the Yankees or the Red Sox. Barnyard animals figured fairly prominently in these sexual inventions.
    Across from her, her friends were in a passionate discussion of their own. The issue was a show over at Harvard of Goya’s famous sketches of the horrors of war. A group of them had taken the T across town to the exhibit, and then wandered, unsettled, through the black-and-white drawings of dismemberment, torture, assassination, and agony. It had struck Ashley that while one can always tell the citizens from the soldiers in the drawings, there was no anonymity in either role. And no safety, either. Death, she thought, has a way of evening things out. It crushes spirit without regard to politics. It is unrelenting.
    She shifted about in her seat, a little uncomfortable. Images, especially violent images, creased her deeply and had done so since she was a child. They lingered unwelcome in her memory, whether they were Salome admiring the head of John the Baptist in a gruesome Renaissance rendition, or Bambi’s mother trying to flee the hunters who pursued her. Even the campy killings of Tarantino’s Kill Bill unsettled her.
    Her de facto date for the evening was a lanky, long-haired BC psychology graduate student named Will, who was leaning across the table, making a point, while trying to narrow the distance between his shoulder and her arm. Small touches were important in courting, she thought. The slightest of shared sensations might lead to something more intense. She was unsure what she thought of him. He was clearly bright and seemed thoughtful. He’d shown up at her apartment earlier with a half dozen roses, which, he said, was the psychological equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card; it meant he could say or do something offensive or stupid and she would likely forgive him at least once. A dozen roses, he said, would have been too many; she would likely see through the artifice of it all, whereas half that number at least held out some promise as well as some mystery. She had thought this was funny, and probably accurate as well, and so she was inclined to like him initially, though it wasn’t long before she started to sense that he was perhaps just a meager bit too full of himself, and less likely to listen than he was to pronounce, which put her off.
    Ashley pushed her hair back from her face and tried to listen.
    “Goya meant to shock. He meant to thrust all the reality of war into the faces of the politicians and aristocrats who romanticize it. Make it undeniable—”
    The last words of this statement were lost, overcome by a burst from the nearby table: “I’ll tell you what Derek Jeter’s good at. He’s good at bending over and…”
    She had to smile to herself. It was a little like being trapped in a uniquely Bostonian version of the