Body Copy - Michael Craven [10]
The nail was painted blue. And on that little blue nail was a little blue key. He grabbed it, unlocked the door, replaced 28
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the key, went in, shut the door, locked the door. It always amazed him how easy it was.
Inside. Unpretentious yet sophisticated. Lined with books and rugs and artwork and a redone kitchen with lots of copper and cooking supplies. Wine, cookbooks, garlic cloves.
He looked around. One big room in the front. Then a sort of side room with a big dining room table on one side and a bookshelf built into the wall on the other. This side-room led to the kitchen, which then led one way back to an office and the other way to a little hallway that went to the bedroom and the door he just came through.
He walked back to the office and opened the sliding glass door that led out to the back deck a foot and a half.
Then he walked back up to the main room in front and stood there not knowing exactly what he was looking for.
He felt something rub his leg and he jerked his foot up. His heart was in his throat. He looked down at a red-orange cat looking right at him with big, mesmerizing, green cat-eyes. He knelt and scratched the cat’s head and looked at the cat’s name tag. It said darryl.
He moved on. He looked in a couple drawers in the front room. Nothing interesting. Some cards, some pictures, some change.
He looked through the dining room, then went in the bedroom. He looked in the drawers, the closets, under the bed, then the drawers again. And here’s what he found: stuff that’s usually in drawers and closets and under beds.
He walked back into the office.
There was another bookshelf full of books. Some writers he really liked. A real mix. Mark Twain. Joyce Carol 29
Michael Craven
Oates. Elmore Leonard. Is that La Brava? Great book. But he didn’t have time to look at them; he had to keep moving.
He looked through her desk drawers, carefully. There were bills, papers, notes, old notebooks. But nothing to do with Roger Gale except some photocopies of a few different obituaries.
Then he saw some kind of manuscript, a big stack of typed pages. Was she writing a book? Only some of the manuscript was there. The top of the page that was face-up said 213. Tremaine picked it up, started reading. This is what it said:
And you can’t quite describe the feeling because there are so many feelings. They come in waves. Sometimes it’s simply that you can’t believe your marriage broke up. You can’t believe you are one of the failures. But that’s not so much a feeling as it is a thought-through realization. The feelings are more erratic. Sometimes you’re happy—happy it’s over, happy you’re out of a difficult situation. Sometimes you’re introspec-tive, analyzing the divorce from an almost clinical, outsider’s perspective. Sometimes you’re nostalgic; a random memory can hit you from nowhere at any time. But the hardest one, the one I don’t even like to acknowledge, even when it’s just me and the feeling, is the feeling of being lost. Not just lonely. Lost. Lost at sea, with no connections back to the mainland that is your life.
Nina had gone through a divorce and was writing a book about it. Tremaine felt the blood move in his body.
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He knew what she was writing about. He’d been married.
And divorced. He liked that she was putting into words a feeling he had had. He looked back down at the page.
You are locked in to another person, to a life together, and suddenly it’s gone. And you don’t know what to do with yourself. You don’t know who you are or who you’re still connected to. With me, I had pulled away from my family. My husband was my family. I actually felt strange in my new single role talking to my own parents. Everything in my life seemed strange, seemed wrong. I desperately needed to reconnect—with my family, with my life. I needed something good.
Tremaine heard the front door opening.
In one move, he put the manuscript back on the desk and went sideways out the open sliding glass door. He ran toward the fence,