Free Schemers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels) by Bill Pronzini

walls. She preferred the confines of her brown-shingled house—familiar, the place where she’d been happy before the stroke that had left her with partial facial paresis. But sometimes a restlessness seized her, too. At night, for the most part. Days, she had her watercolors and charcoal sketches and the graphics design business she was trying to build up.
    He was seeing her three or four times a week now. Mostly at night, even on weekends. She didn’t like to go out much in the daylight hours. They had dinner usually, at one of the same two coffee shops on Taraval. In other restaurants, places where she wasn’t known, people had a tendency to stare at her or to cluck their stupid tongues because of the scarf and the way she was forced to eat, twisting open the good side of her mouth to take the food, chewing and swallowing in awkward movements with her head down over her plate because no matter how careful she was, pieces of food or dribbles of liquid sometimes leaked out. If there was one thing she hated more than anything else, it was pity—a stranger’s pity worst of all.
    Now and then they took in a movie; she was comfortable in darkened theaters. In good weather they went for walks on Ocean Beach or Land’s End, away from people. Or sat in the car somewhere and talked. He’d been inside the brown-shingled house only twice, once to see her paintings and graphic designs, once for a glass of wine.
    He had not touched her except to take her arm when they went up or down stairs, or to help her on and off with her coat. And yet a closeness had developed between
them, a slow-developing bond of trust. Different by far from his relationships with the other two women in his life, the caretaker role he’d had to assume with half-crazy, alcoholic Andrea, the fire and passion and soul-deep love he’d shared with Colleen. If it ever moved to another level with Bryn … all right. Now, what they had was enough. They’d never discussed it, but he thought she felt the same way.
    Most people would find their relationship odd, he supposed. If he’d had to explain it to somebody else, he couldn’t have found the right words. The closest he could come was that before they met, they’d been like a couple of turtles hiding in their shells. Hers fashioned by the stroke and a shit of a husband who couldn’t deal with her affliction and losing custody of her nine-year-old son to his father; his made from the loss of Colleen and the six months death watch he’d had to endure while the cancer ate at her from within. Now the turtles’ heads were out, only partway but still out. A couple of lonely, damaged creatures, blinking in the light, finding understanding and acceptance in each other and taking solace from it.
    He drove them down through Pacifica, over Devil’s Slide, to Half Moon Bay. Nice night, clear, the stars cold and nail-head bright in a black sky. Bryn had very little to say, focused inward. He didn’t try to make conversation. The silences between them were comfortable now.
    At one of the stoplights in Half Moon Bay he said, “Go on a little farther, or head back?”
    “A little farther.”
    She didn’t speak again until they were approaching the beach at San Gregorio. Then, “I saw my doctor today.”
    “What did he say?”
    “No change. He’s honest, he doesn’t give out false hope. It’s almost certain now that I’ll have the paralysis for the rest of my life.”
    “He could still be wrong.”
    “He’s not wrong. Sometimes …”
    When she didn’t go on right away, Runyon glanced over at her. She was staring straight ahead, back stiff, knees together, hands cupped together in her lap—the sitting posture of a young girl.
    “Sometimes,” she said finally, “I feel like I’m going crazy.”
    “I know the feeling.” Mourning Colleen in the allconsuming way he had, Joshua lost to him, work his only sanctuary … he’d been close to the edge himself, closer than he’d let himself believe.