Free The Night Watchman by Richard Zimler

and older sister, Olivia, who lived back home in Portugal. The one I liked best showed the two sisters at the beach at Caparica when Mom was twelve and Aunt Olivia nineteen. They’re each holding up a ping-pong racket and grinning. I keep that picture in my wallet. I like having the two sisters with me wherever I go.
    After Mom died, Dad used to take me and Ernie on trips all over Colorado and New Mexico. We saw a golden eagle nest in Rocky Mountain National Park and stayed the weekend at a motel in Santa Fe that had deer antlers over the reception desk. He even let us share his bed on most nights, Ernie on one side of him and me on the other, and he’d keep his hand atop my head all night, because I’d decided I couldn’t sleep if he wasn’t exactly where he was supposed to be.
    Maybe everything I’ve done in my life has its origin in my father’s complexity. And maybe every case I’ve investigated has been one more opportunity to solve the mystery forever staring at me with his suspicious brown eyes – which are also my eyes, for better or for worse. Do we all lead the lives we lead because we have to know why things happened the way they did, and if there had been any other way they could have combined together to produce something more gentle and meaningful and permanent?
    I have two photos of my mother from 1980. I know I took them that summer, because Dad bought me a Canon camera at the end of the school year. Mom looks all used up in them, as if she’d been on an uphill climb for so long that she was too exhausted to go on, though she was only thirty-eight years old at the time – still young, though her eyes are bruised-looking and her hair is like old frayed rope.
    I don’t look at those photos of her too often. They’re in my night-table drawer, right at the bottom, where no one else will ever see just how dead inside she’d become.
    I have no idea where the negatives are. I couldn’t find them when it came time to leave for Portugal. I hope the new owners of our Colorado ranch discovered where they were and threw them out; I don’t like to think of my mom’s negatives stuck in a place where she was so unhappy; death should free us, if nothing else.
    On the Friday after receiving the Spectre’s first message, I grabbed Ernie and led him down by the stream, a quarter of a mile from our house, to a meadow where my dad and I used to practise shooting. I grabbed a blanket, too, since even though it was late May, we were at six thousand seven hundred feet and temperatures fell below freezing at night. We lived a half-mile from our nearest neighbours, a couple in their eighties named Johnson. Both Mr and Mrs Johnson were deaf, I figured at the time. Now, I realize that they must not have wanted to get mixed up in what went on at our ranch.
    Ernie had an ornery, little-kid energy that could drive you crazy, since if you didn’t watch him closely he might start tugging the cord of a lamp out of the socket or turn over the garbage in the kitchen. I can see now that he was just naturally curious, but at the time his actions seemed aimed at getting both of us punished by Dad.
    Ernie lived on the surface of his senses as a kid. In particular, he was tuned in to the calls of birds in the morning. And to their colours. Their singing and screeching would wake him up at dawn, and he’d slide out of bed in his pyjamas and stand at our window as if he were watching Santa Claus and his reindeer prepare for their Christmas Eve adventures. Ernie had dark brown hair cut real short and big watery green eyes that were always darting around, with the long lashes that a lot of Portuguese people have. And he had a scent that was all his own, and that I loved – like warm oatmeal.
    ‘They look to me like tiny fern fronds.’
    That’s what Mom used to say about Ernie’s eyelashes.
    When Mom complimented Ernie’s looks, maybe she was also saying that there was still something special and beautiful about herself, too, even