Dead in D Minor
Page 27
“I’ll go tell him,” said Jeremy, and wheeled off to do so.
“You may as well come sit while you’re waiting,” said Mrs. Gibson. She opened the door and let him in. “The Professor’s way at the back of the house, and if he’s playing piano, he won’t stop for the Second Coming.” She listened. “I don’t hear it, though. You can take your shoes off and leave ‘em by the door. Outside, please. I don’t know where they’ve been, do I?”
“So, this is the guy who found the money?” said Jeremy Ash, inspecting Trelawney as he would an inanimate object. “They thought you killed that Judge, didn’t they?”
“Jeremy,” Albert admonished softly.
“But the Professor got you off, didn’t he?”
“Jeremy . . . ” said Albert.
“I’m just repeatin’ what I read,” said Jeremy. “You won’t tell me nothin’ about it. I knew I heard that funny name before. That’s where. Am I right?”
“Jeremy . . . I don’t want to . . . ”
“I know. I know,” said the long-suffering teenager as he tucked his remaining leg under his rump. “You don’t want to talk about it. You don’t ever want to talk about it.” He rolled up to Trelawney until they were knee-to-knee. “He won’t want to talk about it.”
Trelawney smiled.
Albert looked uncomfortably about the room. He thought he was moving to the end of the world when he relocated his mattress and the piano at the back of the house. It hadn’t been far enough. The world could still find him.
“I just wanted to thank you,” said Tanjore. Things had changed. They weren’t at the little loft on the hillside, anymore. Albert wasn’t Mr. Elmo. He was the man the whole world seemed to be talking about. “That’s all.”
Albert forced a smile and nodded.
“I thought you’d like to know – Heather went back to England,” Trelawney said. “She turned herself in.”
“Angela,” Albert corrected, mostly for the sake of Jeremy who was giving him his ‘who the heck is Heather, and why haven’t I heard of her?’ look.
“Right,” said Trelawney. “She’s in prison now. I’m not sure how long.”
Prison would be a nice place. They kept the world away on purpose. Albert wondered how you got in. Innocence seemed to help.
“Not too long, I should imagine,” said Trelawney after a while. “Got an older sister who’s taken an interest in her, I understand.
“Remember the fellow who gave Cindy such a hard time? Jimbo? Matt Harvey found out how he happened to turn up after all that time. Turns out he got in a barroom brawl the night Cindy and Maylene ran away. Ended up half killing a policeman who’d come to break it up.
“Ended up in prison all that time. As soon as he got out, he looked up Cindy.
“You know . . . we’ve been seeing a lot of each other . . . Cindy and me.”
It was impossiblenot to see a lot of Cindy. “Cindy and I,” said Albert, referring to his recent grammar lessons. Even da Vinci couldn’t have captured his smile.
“I? Really?”
“Cindy and I have been seeing a lot of each other. That’s how you’d say it. Ask Mrs. Grandy,” said Albert, referring Tanjore to a higher power.
“Maylene still plays those three songs . . . practically all the time. You’ll have to come back and teach her a new one someday. Someday soon.”
Albert said nothing.
“Kitty Odum moved into your old room,” he continued. “She’s retired now. Everything else is still pretty much the same.
“Well,” Trelawney added, rising in the brittle silence. The reunion hadn’t been as warm as he’d expected. He chalked it up to Albert’s experience with Standish. Who could you trust? He was probably right. “I’ll be off,” he said. “I just wanted to say, you know, thanks, for everything.”
Albert turned to his keyboard and began running the tips of his fingers gently over the keys. “Good-bye.”
“That’s how he is,” said Jeremy Ash, as they wheeled and walked down the long, long hallway. “The best way you can thank him is leave him alone. That’s what me an’ Mrs. Gibson do. Just go back now and then to make sure he ain’t starved himself to death.”
They were silent to the end of the hall. “That’s how he wants it.” said Jeremy Ash again.
Albert cracked the door slightly and watched them leave.
He’d been wrong about DuShane; he thought he’d been innocent because he seemed too guilty.
There were no rules in murder.
And Standish? There were no rules in friendship either. He wasn’t altruistic, though; he’d said so himself.
How could people be so cruel to one another? he wondered. “When it cost nothing to be kind.”
He closed the door, turned out the light, and caressed piano keys, anointing the neighborhood with music, weeping in the warmth as the cocoon closed once more about him.
The world was no place for Albert.
THE END
BOOKS BY DAVID CROSSMAN
from
Alibi-Folio
The Albert Mysteries
Requiem for Ashes
Dead in D Minor
Coda* (2013)
Winston Crisp Mysteries
A Show of Hands
The Dead of Winter
Justice Once Removed
Photo Club Mysteries
Dead and Breakfast
Bean and Ab Young Adult Mysteries
The Secret of the Missing Grave
The Mystery of the Black Moriah
The Legend of Burial Island
The Riddle of Misery Light (2013)
Historical Novel
Silence the Dead
Fantasy
Storyteller
Night of the Full Moon Catch (2013)
Thriller
A Terrible Mercy (2012)
David A. Crossman is a best-selling novelist, an award-winning lyricist and composer, a writer of short stories, screenplays, teleplays, and children’s books, a television producer/director (also award-winning), a video producer, radio/television talent, award-winning graphic, computer graphic artist, advertising copywriter, videographer, publisher, music producer, musician, singer, performer and . . . well, you get the picture. He’s shiftless. He divides his time between the home he shares with his wife Barbara and worlds that don’t exist beyond the borders of his mind.
www.davidcrossman.com
davidcrossman@comcast.net