Come Back Dead (28 page)

47

I went up to Drury's suite long enough to shower and change my clothes. I shaved, too, or made a pass at it. The process was complicated by Clark's handiwork, which was healing colorfully, and by a strange reluctance I felt to look into a mirror.

I asked at the hotel desk for a cab, and the clerk directed me to the drugstore where I was almost a regular. The cabbie was at the lunch counter, ignoring his coffee. I drank it for him by way of getting his attention. He delivered me to the station just as the first rumbles of the Chicago train were sounding in the hazy distance.

I'd found my pipe while rummaging through my bags at the hotel. I filled it as I waited, packing the tobacco loosely, as my father had recommended. The pipe had dried out since my last attempt to smoke it, back on the porch of the farmhouse on the long ago Friday evening when Linda Traynor, or someone very like her, had stolen a kiss. The pipe didn't gurgle now or burn my tongue or go out on short notice. It just hurt my teeth.

I was hoping the pipe might distract Ella from my face, but there wasn't that much smoke in it. She was the first one off the train, stepping onto the platform as the steam from the obsolete engine was still swirling about. I liked the effect–and her traveling attire: a white suit that looked crisper than the shirt I'd just put on and a simple matching hat, under which she'd tucked her hair. Against all the white, her pale eyes looked bluer than normal. That is, they did until they narrowed at the sight of me.

“Scotty,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Paddy, too?”

“Paddy always.”

“The job over?”

“My part of it.”

She stepped up close enough for me to take her in my arms. “To think I married you for your looks,” she said.

“Serves you right,” I said and kissed her.

The kiss told Ella something, bruises and sore teeth and all. “Welcome back,” she said.

“Sorry for being away so long.” I wasn't speaking of the time I'd spent in Indiana, and Ella knew it.

“It was only the tiniest part of our time,” she said, and we kissed again.

When we'd finished, I asked, “What are the chances of shipping the kids out parcel post?”

“Are you suddenly feeling paternal?”

“Their grandfather would like to meet them.”

The answer sounded better than my real reason for wanting the kids to see Indiana, which was that it might not be around to see much longer, not my Indiana, not if Carson Drury's screwy prophecy was right and the country was about to throw itself off a cliff.

It didn't seem very likely to me just then, standing on the Traynorville platform while porters unloaded newspapers and produce from the train, and the few heads visible in the passenger car waited patiently for Ella and me to kiss again.

Ella was aware of our audience, too. “Is there someplace private where we could go to get reacquainted?” she asked, nestling against me. “Unless you'd rather see a movie.”

“It has been a while,” I said, holding her tighter still. “I wonder what's playing.”

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1997 by Terence Faherty

Cover design by Kelly Parr

ISBN 978-1-4976-9065-3

This 2014 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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