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

“Sure…”

But by the time I’d said it, he was already across his front yard, opening the gate and crossing the road. Dehan and I exchanged a glance and followed him.

Beyond the sidewalk there was a concrete wall, and beyond the wall there was a drop down to the white sand. Alornerk stood on the wall a while, with the sea breeze whipping his sweatshirt, and as we crossed the road and joined him, he seemed to fold up and rearrange himself into a sitting position, looking out at the sea. Dehan sat on his left and I took my position on his right.

“I’m assuming you are Alornerk Smith?”

“Of course I am.” He said it without inflection and without looking at me.

“We would like to ask you some questions about the day Jack Connors was killed. Have you any objection to that?”

“I assumed as much. Of course I have no objection. It was four and a half years ago, but my memory is pretty good.”

Forty or fifty yards away, on the shore, a kid ran past, chasing a huge ball that was being blown by the breeze. It bounced and rolled in big bounds, and the kid’s laughter came to us in ragged snatches.

“How is Helena?”

The question surprised me. “You haven’t seen her recently?”

“Not in a while.”

Dehan was watching the kid with his ball. He’d managed to catch it and was now running back towards his mother, holding it in front of him. She spoke absently, like she wasn’t really interested. “You guys used to be pretty close.”

“She used to work here, in the English department. We became very close. Her husband was based in New York, she was based here. I thought it would go on like that forever. Then she had her first best seller.” He looked down at his long, thin feet dangling from his long, thin legs. “It’s almost unheard of, you know?”

Dehan asked the question. “What is?”

“For an academic in English literature to be a successful author.”

“Oh.”

“So I never really expected her to become a success.”

I studied his face a moment. He still hadn’t looked at either of us. “You were in love with her.”

“When your whole life revolves around academic mathematics…”

He trailed off and looked at me for the first time. His eyes flicked around, examining every feature on my face.

“Because,” he said, as though answering an unspoken question, “mathematics is everywhere, and everything, like God. It is the hidden meaning that inhabits all things. But in academia we take it and we abstract it so that all it has left is its numeric value. And then, when your whole life revolves around academic mathematics and numeric values, you can lose the ability to integrate abstract human feelings into your understanding of the world.”

I looked back at the sea and saw that the little boy’s mother had him now by his ankles and was holding him upside down. The ball had escaped again and was being pursued into the sea by a red setter. “I can’t imagine how you would do that,” I said.

He shrugged. “Emotion is an entire chaos system in its own right. How can you give a value to a chaos system?”

“I wouldn’t have thought you could.”

“You can’t.”

Dehan looked up at the sky directly above us. The blue was an intense contrast to the white sand. “So, when you went to New York for the launch of her book, were you still lovers?”

He looked at his hands, at the palms; they were long and thin like his legs and his feet. Dehan sighed and added, “I mean, in the ordinary sense of the words.”

Now he looked at her for the first time and nodded. “Yeah, I get bogged down in trying to understand the meaning of words and symbols, because there are no sharp lines separating one meaning from another…”

“Alornerk?”

He sighed and looked away. She persisted. “Were you lovers, in the ordinary sense of the word, when you went to her book launch in October, 2014?”

He licked his lips and drew breath several times. “Yes, yes we were lovers. Just, barely, anymore… How? How do you quantify dying love? And if you can’t quantify it, how can you understand it?” He looked back at her for a moment. “Nothing hurts more than not understanding.”

I nodded. “Not understanding definitely makes pain worse. No doubt about that. So, are you telling us that in October 2014, Helena had only recently moved to New York?”

“You didn’t know that? Her first book had been a smash. And it was looking like the second one was going to be even bigger. Advance sales were off the chart. She told me she was moving to New York. She had some story about teaching creative writing to underprivileged people in the Bronx, but I knew the real reason was that she wanted to be closer to that Jack.”

Dehan thrust out her bottom lip and gave a single nod. “That must have sucked.”

He gave a small laugh. “You know about the styles of attachment? Bowlby? I am the anxious-ambivalent type. One of the characteristics of the anxious-ambivalent type is a highly acute sense of behavioral analysis. You can read people’s behavior like it’s a telegraphic message. I knew when she was lying, I knew when she was growing bored, I knew when she was preparing to leave me even before she did.”

“Did you live together?”

“Not at first. I was married back then. But by the end of it, I was with her all the time. It cost me my marriage. For a while we were totally wrapped up in each other. It was very intense. We couldn’t get enough of each other. It went on for months.”

They hadn’t noticed, but the big red, white and blue ball had rolled