Free The Last Storyteller by Frank Delaney Page A

here.” Then she looked away.
    “You’re hiding something.”
    “This is none of my business,” she said.
    “But it is mine.” I caught her hands. “What are you hiding?”
    Lily Egan had always liked me. I knew that, and my touch to her hands succeeded.
    “We had a woman staying here once who was very like her in temperament. Here for six weeks, and she never said a word. The man she was with used to hit her.” I tightened my grip on her hands. “Stop,” she pleaded because she saw me ignite. “Don’t. You’ll do nobody any good.”
    I said, “Are you sure?”
    She eased from my grip but still held my hand. “The children are watchful. But the fellow—he has a terrible temper.”
    “Have you heard him speak to her?”
    Lily Egan now rolled her velvet eyes and whispered at the top of her dramatic scale, “Like you wouldn’t speak to a pig. Calls her stupid, thick, slow, an imbecile.” She mimicked him: “ ‘Children, look at what your stupid mother has done now.’ He called her a ‘sow’ the other day in front of me.”
    He had to die. I knew it. Children, forgive me. I know that he raised you. Forgive me.
    We both fell silent. Lily Egan never took her eyes off me. I leaned back against her wall.
    “What am I to do?”
    “Nothing until you calm down.”
    “When are they coming back?”
    “In time for the show,” she said. “Why don’t you go away and think about all this?”
    “Maybe I will.” I could feel my heat slipping away, and in the distance I saw my sanity rising like a peak above clouds.
    Lily Egan read more books than anybody I knew, cheap romances. She kept stacks of them all over the house, as carefully shelved and classifiedas in any library. Doctor-and-nurse romances occupied the parlor; boss-and-secretary in the dining room; test-pilot-and-pretty-servicewomen took the stairs; cowboy-and-cowgirl, the main bathroom. She had once told me that she kept what she called “the real stuff” in her bedroom. “And nobody gets in there,” she’d added.
    Now, and not to my surprise, she asked me, “Do you still love her?”
    I gave her the answer I had been giving myself over the years: “There’s nothing still about it.”
    If you’re wondering how she knew so much, children, remember that I had been traveling the countryside searching for your mother, and therefore everybody knew me as the young man whose wife had disappeared. See Ireland as a village and you will completely understand.
    “Well,” said Lily Egan, in her summarizing fashion, “if you love her, you’ll find a better way back into her heart than causing trouble.”
    I said, “I doubt it,” but I did leave.
    Fifteen minutes later, I saw him. Alone. I knew him at once: thin as a plank, white raincoat, and that swagger. For some reason, you had all parted company and he’d come down the main street to a newspaper shop for cigarettes.
    When he came out, fiddling with the packet, I stood in front of him, blocking his path. He thought it clumsy or accidental, but I blocked him again. After a question had crossed his face with a frown, he knew why I had come.
    “Are you who I think you are?”
    I nodded. Rocks cracked together inside my head. His English accent helped me. From the unsteady depths of our Irish history, I could demonize him. Not that I would need many reasons.
    My more rational voice asked,
Why not maim him instead of killing him? For the rest of his life? Reduce him? Immobilize him? Scar him so that he’ll be banished evermore from public view?
    The answer came back, obstreperous and clear:
Not enough. He has to quit the planet
.
    Yet another voice, my sanest, said,
Don’t do this, Ben. This is not for you. Stop
.
    They say that when hired killers see their intended victims, they sometimes get qualms. Not me. He spoke again, his voice full of light and fright.
    “This is personal, isn’t it?”
    Again I nodded, refusing to dignify him with my words. I had warned myself,
Don’t speak. Not