Free Blackwater Sound by James W. Hall Page A

breath, and climbed the narrow stairs into the dark, airless heat. It’d been months since she’d been up there. That long since she’d needed to make the journey. But it was coming up on Easter, the anniversary of all the bad shit. And then there was the stuff from work, the pressures, the desperate come-from-behind finish she was trying to pull off.
    A wedge of light angled across the dusty floor of the attic. Passing into the shadows, Morgan bumped her shin against a footlocker. She winced, sucked down a breath, and kept on going, slipping past a broken rocking chair, a stack of old records, a baby bassinet. The cane-back chair was still there. Standing upright now.
    She held on to the back of the chair and stepped onto it, teeteringfor a second. When she had her balance, she reached overhead into the darkness and found the rafter, and ran her hand down the smooth wood until she came to the nylon rope that her mother had knotted there.
    She touched a fingertip to the bristly end where Johnny’s knife blade had sawed through the strands. She closed her eyes and gripped that stub of rope and held on until the blood ran out of her arm and it began to grow heavy and numb.
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    Morgan lay in the dark, her head on Andy’s pillow. His room was the same. Untouched in ten years. His clothes ironed, hanging neatly in his closet. His shelves lined with novels and science texts. His trophies from high school, a photograph of Albert Einstein, a bust of Beethoven. His notes organized in colored folders. His careful script. A treasure trove. Notations, pages of math, detailed technical drawings, his storehouse of ideas. Like some young Leonardo da Vinci, his engineering designs and scientific observations, his experiments light-years ahead of his time. Morgan had managed to decode only one of his ideas so far and it alone had managed to steer MicroDyne back to profitability. There were hundreds of pages of other formulas, detailed drawings of machines and microcircuitry he’d conceived. And there were the anatomical doodles of women with boyish hips and small breasts. Dozens of them. All with Morgan’s shape.
    Morgan could no longer smell his scent on the pillowcase. She had long ago inhaled all those leftover particles. Absorbed them, taken them into her bloodstream. Now there were only the invisible molecules, charged atoms, the last traces of his fairy dust lingering in the air. She breathed them in, let them out. Breathed them in again.
    Then she was drifting into a dream: Andy was writing on a chalkboard, Morgan sitting in the front row of an empty classroom. Andy was walking her through a formula, the numbers hazy in her dream. She squinted at them but couldn’t make them out. She raised herhand, and was waiting for him to turn from the chalkboard and call on her when the phone shook her awake.
    She fumbled in the dark and got it on the third ring. Her hello was deep-throated and groggy.
    â€œMorgan Braswell?”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œMy name is Julie Jamison.”
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œI’m sorry to disturb you so late, Miss Braswell.”
    â€œIs this a sales call?”
    â€œI’m a writer,” the woman said. “I’m calling to confirm a few facts on a story I’m doing.”
    â€œAbout me?”
    â€œYour family,” die woman said. “Do you have a minute? Somebody’s made some pretty serious accusations. We’d like to hear your side of things before we go ahead with this.”
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    It was nearly two in the morning when Morgan parked the six-year-old Mercedes in their space at Hobe Bay Marina. Johnny shuffled along behind her, head bowed, mumbling. Morgan marched down the dock. It was breezy and the halyards were jingling and dark water sloshed against the pilings.
    â€œMy thumb aches,” Johnny said. “I think I nicked the bone. It really hurts.”
    â€œNot now, Johnny. Not now.”
    Their Hatteras was moored in the