Blue Mercy: A Novel. Read Free Page B

to twitch and beckon me across.
    I picked it up, tapped its flat head against my palm, felt the weight of what I was about to do.
    Pulling my mind shut -- no more thoughts allowed -- I let it swing, hard and fast, into the TV screen. Smash . Shards of glass went spiking through the air. Smash again. The glass cabinet this time. I regretted that Star and I had cleared the glasses and ornaments from the shelves a few hours earlier; I would have loved to unleash myself on them.
    Thump . I brought the hammer down on the little side table but it only made a dent. I threw it aside, running out of the room, through the kitchen, out the back door. It was dry outside and not cold, not for December. The security light came on, spotlighting weeds that cracked through the gravel, tough survivors.
    Jerking open the bolt on the shed, I grazed my knuckles. I sucked on the pain, my tongue moving across bone and blood, as I hurried on. I felt like a hurricane, like a snowstorm, like a raging ocean, hurrying, hurrying through my wild throbbing hurry that kept thought at bay. In the corner of the shed, I found what I was looking for: the sledgehammer. Its heavy head pulled me down as I ran back inside and went entirely amok.
    I smashed the coffee table and the sideboard. I smashed the fiddly occasional table that always wobbled, making us fearful for the lamp. I smashed the lamp.  
    I turned my back on the piano -- that I couldn't destroy -- and when I came to the bureau too, I hesitated. This was my father's most precious piece of furniture: bought in Paris, his only relic of his time in France. All through my childhood, I had watched him sitting at this desk to write, or do what he called "the books", the accounts that measured his income against his expenses, the largest of which – as he never failed to remind -- was me.
    Smash . The lump hammer put a deep V into the desk's top and the back fell open. As it did, a torrent of paper tumbled out. Money. Notes. Old pound notes and fivers and tenners and twenties, one of my father's secret stashes. He had them all over the house: in a biscuit tin under the floorboards in his bedroom, inside an old plant-food container on a high shelf in the back pantry, and no doubt in lots of other places that I knew nothing about.
    It was the other bounty, though, that had made me pounce: those notebooks of his tumbling to the floor. What would it do to me to read them? The thought set my heart fluttering around its cage of ribs, as if he were still alive to catch me, but down I sat in the middle of the devastation and opened the largest one, hand on my chest as I started to read: "I went to the conscription office this morning, with a pair of jokers I met on the train..."

    It was quite a while later -- I have no idea how long -- when the doorbell rang. My thoughts flew immediately to Zach. Could he have heard that Star had left and decided to come back to me?
    The bell rang again.
    No, I had made my choice and we both knew what it meant. Whoever it was going to be, it wasn't Zach.
    I pushed myself up from the floor and toed my way through the debris, the large notebook held in front of my chest like a shield. Anyone but Zach was an unwelcome intrusion. Except, maybe, Star. But it was even less likely to be her. Her departure this afternoon had been emphatic, complete with instructions on how she was, and was not, to be contacted in future.
    My lover and my daughter, both gone for good. For all our good, I suppose. And I, too, would be leaving soon. I had a sudden, painful ache for California, for the width of its ocean and the height of its trees, for a blast of its big breeziness to come and blow through the cramped spaces of this house.
    The bell rang a third time. When I finally opened the door, I saw from the faces of the two policemen standing there that I hadn't done myself any favors by delaying to answer.
    "Detective Inspector Patrick O'Neill," said the one who wasn't wearing a uniform, flipping a