Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) Read Online Free PDF Page B

computer illiterate to computer devoted. I keep waiting to catch her playing solitaire, or watching a CD, or browsing consumer products on the Net, but I’ve never found her doing anything but work on her machine, or sometimes writing letters. For Melinda, work is peace. She is not a person who enjoys many things, but work is one of them. No surprise that in two years she’s worked her way to second in command of Fraud and Computer Crime—a twelve-person section.
    She looked up at me when I went in, and let her reading glasses dangle on the chain around her neck.
    “Tired?” she asked.
    “Not really. I’m going to take Moe up the hill. Want to come?”
    “I’ve got work.”
    She studied me for a moment. She has a clear-eyed, analytical gaze that gathers much more than it gives away. I’d hate to be one of her suspects in an interrogation. In fact, I’ve seen her work—through the one-way mirrors—and she is extremely effective. But her stare melted into a smile and she nodded her head slightly.
    “Nice work today, Terry. Four months to nail that creep. And you ended up doing something decent for the girl. You should feel good about you.”
    “Thanks, Mel. I do. But I think about the life Chet took away from her.”
    “You can’t be everywhere at once.”
    I stepped forward and kissed her lips. I didn’t hold it long because I knew she had work to do. Those lips are sweet as sugar when she wants them to be. Just six months ago we were to the point of going weeks or more without anything more intimate than a peck on the cheek—if that. Mel was a wreck. Her father had died. And though he had avoided her in childhood like some guilty secret, she had tracked him down and stayed in touch with him in a remote but regular way the last few years of his miserable life. His death hit her hard. And I realized that the end of someone you desperately want to love you but never did can hurt as much as that of someone who treasures you. Maybe it’s just one last confirmation of your own unlovability. But Melinda’s inner darkness gradually broke, and something of her old self has emerged from the long, black night.
    “See you soon,” I said.
    Our house is on Canyon Edge, the fifth one in from Laguna Canyon Road. It’s a ramshackle little place, built in three stages, over three decades, in three “styles”—none of which I can really define. But it was affordable for Mel and me as co-buyers, and the money is worth the quiet canyon life and the beautiful Pacific, which is just a couple of miles away. In the big fire of ‘93, it was one of only eight houses on Canyon Edge that didn’t burn down. Thirty-seven were reduced to nothing but fireplaces and chimneys that day in October.
    I let Moe out of the backyard and we headed down Canyon Edge, away from Laguna Canyon Road. The road is crooked and uneven, without streetlights and sidewalks, but it also has almost no traffic because it dead-ends a half mile into the canyon. Once we were past the last rebuilt house I stood for a moment on the scorched foundation of Scotty Barris’s place. Scotty didn’t rebuild because he wasn’t insured. It was an old place, the oldest on the street, built by Scotty’s father and uncles back in the early twenties. Now it’s just a rectangle of black cement with weeds growing up through it and some twisted rods of rebar bent at odd angles. For sale.
    Past the black foundation you pick up a trail in the high weeds and climb a steep embankment. The trail levels off, then meanders back down to the canyon floor and follows a creek bed that is dry except after a rain. Moe led the way. He’s a real dog’s dog when it comes to the outdoors, always in the brush after birds or critters—true to his Labrador instincts. I’ve never hunted him. I quit shooting things for sport when Matthew died, just another one of those things I used to love to do and then didn’t love anymore. I miss the taste of quail and dove and pheasant. I miss those