Free The Cavanaugh Quest by Thomas Gifford

She was worked up.” I yawned, too. “And if Tim Dierker thought she was so wonderful, what bothered him so much about Larry marrying her? Pieces missing in there.”
    “Long time ago. Half of what happened people forget entirely, the other half they get wrong in trying to tell it. It all gets distorted. Faulty memories are right in the middle of writing mystery novels—the characters have them, the reader sure as hell has one, frequently the writer does, too.” He yawned again. “Memories, on the whole, are for shit, Paul.”
    “Ole Kronstrom fell in love with her, for God’s sake,” I said. “Now I ask you, would he fall in love with a monster?”
    “Hardly. Ole was a simple man. Or a fool, or maybe just lucky. I mean, after all, Ole is not necessarily the fellow you’d pick for Kim, not on the nice shiny surface of things, anyway.”
    “Did you know about them?”
    “Tough not to.” Archie stood up and kicked off his sneakers, wriggled his toes in the grass. Newly mowed grass mottled his white feet. We walked up to the house together. A motorboat whined into life down on the lake and the sound floated up the hill, a part of summer indistinguishable from all the other parts, the smells of the flowers and the Coppertone and the sounds of the insects. I followed him back across the stones into the cool library.
    “Enough history,” he said. “You want to know about the girl, not my old cronies.” He sank down into a flowered-print chair, the slipcover casually off-center, and crossed his bare feet.
    “I really wanted to know why Blankenship killed himself.” I heard myself say it; it didn’t seem strange. I did want to know; the curiosity had just sort of infected me , like a siege of walking pneumonia I’d once had.
    “That’s what I say, Paul—the girl.” He stroked his white mustache with a bony knuckle. “The girl, I’m trying to remember what, what it is I know, or knew, about her …” He sucked the knuckle for a minute and I could see Julia kneeling by the flower border. She was troweling moist, dark earth and looked as if she were enjoying herself immensely. The sprinkler caught the sun through the trees, held it for a moment, then sprayed along on its way.
    “She came to Norway Creek not long after I came back to the university. I didn’t pay any particular attention to her, though I couldn’t help noticing her. The way she looked, that trim, neat figger, sort of a solemn face, dark eyebrows, dark shiny hair—stupid thing to remember, hair, but what can I tell you?” He shrugged. “It made you wonder if she had a line of that dark hair going up her belly. Well, hell, let’s be candid, Paul. That’s they way she made me think …”
    “You should be ashamed of yourself,” I said.
    “Harriet told you more about her love life than I ever knew. I can’t vouch for the facts but it sounded more or less right to me. But she always impressed me as competent, the kind of person who’d get done whatever she set out to do. She always acted like a person right there in the present, very down to earth, not silly.” He sighed and pursed his lips. “Now, you can call that sort of attitude calculating or mature, dangerous or determined, depending on your point of view.
    “It seems to me that somebody—Dierker, I think—told me she was an orphan from up north, maybe from the town near where we had the lodge. That must be how Tim knew about her, sounds possible. She was a charity case, anyway, and the guys in our group sort of felt sorry for her—seems she was the niece of somebody. Christ, I’m hazy on this, Paul …
    “You really should ask Anne about her if you’re sufficiently curious. Girls do talk to one another, don’t they? They played a lot of tennis. Anne was taking lessons from her, I suppose. Anyway, that’s about all I know …”
    We sat for a while, sleepy. Archie picked up one of the Michael Gilbert novels. I felt my eyelids getting heavy from the luncheon wine and