Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [story read aloud .txt] 📗

DEAD COLD BOX SET: BOOKS 13-16

Copyright © 2019 by Blake Banner

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BOOK 13 – LITTLE DEAD RIDING HOOD

BOOK 14 – TRICK OR TREAT

BOOK 15 – BLOOD INTO WINE

BOOK 16 – JACK IN THE BOX

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BOOK 13

LITTLE DEAD RIDING HOOD

ONE

“Family.” He said it as though it was the answer to a particularly complicated equation. Then he smiled, like he expected me to be amazed at that answer, and turned his smile on Dehan, pulling up his bedclothes as he did so. Rain rattled on the windowpane. A dull, wet glow highlighted his left profile, leaving the right side of his face in semi-darkness. He didn’t want the lights on. His eyes were too sensitive. There was a smell of encroaching death in the room. I had the feeling it was lying patiently in the corners and in the shadows, waiting to creep forward when nobody was looking. It was the reek of flavorless food, musty clothes and too much disinfectant. I had a strong urge to get up and leave. My attention strayed through the rain-spattered glass to the sodden lawn. A drip from the eaves sounded like an accelerated clock.

Sean Reynolds was talking again. “Everybody thinks family is an Italian thing.” He pronounced it ‘eye-talian’. “Like the Italians invented family. ‘Family.’” He wheezed a laugh. “You gotta say it like you’re Robert de Niro. But I’m Irish. I’m not Italian. We came over two centuries ago. And let me tell you, family is just as important to an Irishman as it is to any Italian.”

Dehan was sitting in a sage green armchair that looked almost black in the failing light. She said, “Mr. Reynolds, we were told that your son, Samuel, had some new evidence for us…”

“Oh, he has, he won’t be long. He’s only gone down in the truck to the store. There are things I need, you know. He’s a good lad. He brought my bed down to the living room, so’s I wouldn’t have to climb the stairs. I’m practically bedridden. Family, see? He never married, stayed here with me and Hen.”

“Hen?”

“Helen. We call her Hen. Always have. She’s not…” He screwed up his face, made a gesture with his finger going around in circles at his temple, and mouthed, “not all there… We’ve had some family tragedies. If I told you, believe me.”

Dehan nodded. “That’s the girl who let us in?”

“Hen, yeah.”

“And where is she now? Does she know anything about this new evidence…?”

“Up in her room. She stays in her room. She’s on medication. She didn’t used to take it, but now Samuel makes sure she takes it. He’s a good lad. I don’t know…” He said this last as though answering an inaudible query, then shook his head slowly on the pillow and repeated, “I don’t know…” Then, after a long pause gazing at the rain outside, he added, “What we’d do without him.”

I looked at my watch and drew breath to say that maybe we could come back some other time, but his eyes were glazed and his mind was somewhere else. “Since Eileen died,” he said, in that way he had of making statements as though they were related to something nobody had said.

Dehan spoke from the shadows of her chair. “Eileen was your wife.”

It wasn’t a question and he didn’t answer, he just kept staring at the window, with his mouth slightly open and the covers pulled up almost to his chin.

“Giving birth to Celeste,” he said.

“So Celeste never knew her mother?”

He gave his head the most imperceptible shake. “The good Lord gave us Celeste and took away her mother, all on the same night, twenty years ago, on November ninth. Samuel was only six years old. Helen was eight, and poor Celeste came into the world without ever knowing her mom. That was a cruel night.” His gaze drifted from the window to rest on Dehan’s face. His smile made him look somehow older than he was. He couldn’t have been more than sixty-five, but lying there, he might have been a hundred. “We pulled together, as family. I think Samuel realized that night that it was up to him and me to pull through. To pull the family through.”

A flurry of wind dragged wet leaves across the patch of lawn visible through the glass. The air seemed to groan through the house