Free The Edge of the Gulf by Hadley Hury

recreates in
The Gingerbread Man
the
noir
narrative as a quest for authenticity, and posits a hero whose fragmented values and attention span seem maddeningly familiar.
    Several lines of squalls, like gray armadas with tall ragged thunderheads for topsails, advanced in the afternoon and, with the thunder rumbling and the rain slashing down the windows behind the half-closed louvers of the bedroom shutters, Hudson slept.

Chapter 10
    Sitting on one arm of the brocaded chesterfield Sydney drew a deep swallow of scotch and read the letter. Again.
    Chaz had brought the letter along on the first Sunday in March to the Buckhead restaurant where he was meeting her after an afternoon of sorting through his father’s papers. She had known something was wrong immediately. He was breathing heavily, his eyes first darting nervously around the restaurant and then riveting expectantly on her. When their wine arrived, he had produced the letter from his pants pocket.
    “Something with the inheritance?” Sydney asked, even before looking at the thick letter that had been folded back into its envelope. She had passed the last several days in increasing irritation over the new knowledge that although Chaz would be inheriting a little more than a million dollars, a bit more than she’d guessed, his father had stipulated, in his parsimonious Presbyterian wisdom, that it be doled out as a trust until Chaz reached the age of forty. To distract herself, she had focused instead on the matter of the unremarkable but spacious house off Blacklands Road. It wasn’t the best end of the street but it was still good. They could live there, mortgage-free at least, or realize perhaps six or eight hundred thousand on it.
    “No, not exactly,” said Chaz. He had stared fixedly at the small bowl of freesias in the middle of the table. “Just read it.”
    ***
    Sydney would always remember exactly what she felt on reading, that first time, the letter that Chaz had discovered in his father’s desk. Always a quick study, she had, indistinctly but with instinctive certainty, seen her life rearrange itself before her eyes. Before she had finished reading the letter, she had known that her life was changing or, to put it more accurately, that her life was suddenly taking on its inevitable shape.
    Now she laid the letter on the table and paced the room slowly, trying with the adjustment of a frame here and the smoothing of a rug there to enforce the sense of calm that she had learned to muster in any situation. For someone who had never really known a moment of internal peace in thirty-three years, and who had of necessity thrived more in a realm of anticipation than in the present tense, it was a useful tool, and had enabled her to become a perspicacious strategist in setting and attaining goals. If it might be said that some people were goal-oriented, Sydney was goal-driven. But this rapacious need to get to the next place often did its best work when she tempered it with a cool and critical stillness. Indeed, this combination of living with a mind in overdrive and one foot on the emotional brakes had, over the years, become instinctive. Where once, for a period in her twenties, her dreams and plans and frustrations sometimes kept her awake long hours of the night, she now could summon a remarkable objectivity that helped her channel her energies more usefully. It had certainly served her well as an actor, and now that she had left that career behind it served her well as she moved forward in her new life. And though this capacity for self-preserving poise perhaps did not engender any real serenity or relaxation of her constant vigilance, it at least produced some semblance of regenerative rest occasionally, and, here and there, for scattered moments anyway, an approximation of contentment.
    As she wandered idly now about the room, placing the files back into her leather brief, sitting in the club chair and leafing through an auction catalogue, going for