Sympathy between humans Read Free

that year, did I see much time in basketball games. I’d expected that, but still it made me restless. I went to my classes, trying and failing to be interested in the general-education, Western-civilization courses that make up a freshman’s schedule. I didn’t feel like a student. I didn’t feel like an athlete. I didn’t have any sense of a life coming together.
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That was when I realized something I hadn’t planned on: I was homesick for the Range. The shivering birches and white pines, the green grass and mine-scarred red dirt, the pit lakes as blue-green as semiprecious stones: somehow, when I hadn’t been paying attention, it had gotten into my blood.
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When my aunt Ginny had her stroke and died, that summer, it destabilized me more than I realized at the time. In the fall I went back to school as normal, but nothing there made sense to me anymore. Within two weeks of the start of instruction, I wrote a letter to the coach and caught a Greyhound back to Minnesota, earnings from my summer job rolled up as traveler’s checks in my duffel bag. I didn’t know what I needed so badly, but somehow I was certain it lay back in Minnesota.
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Drinking a cold, sweet Pepsi in a coffee shop across from the bus station in Duluth, I scanned the want ads. A taconite-mining company based in a small town was looking for a cleaning-and-maintenance trainee in their shop; it was one of the few entry-level positions in that kind of operation. On the opposite page from the job ads were “housing to shareâ€

 
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“I don’t see a case here,â€

 
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Several days passed. Comfortable now with Aidan’s presence in the Hennessy home, I spent less time there, and my nights at home.
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There, late at night, I found myself restless, surfing late-night TV. Occasionally, pausing on one of the educational channels, I’d see a show on forensics: techs observing the glow of Leuco Crystal Violet stains or peering at fibers under a microscope. I’d switch away quickly. Other than that, I kept my mind off Gray Diaz. Likewise Cicero Ruiz. My aborted letter to Shiloh remained buried under newspapers and unpaid bills. Work, in general, was uneventful.
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One such workday ended with an errand out toward the lake country, reinterviewing a witness in an old case with leads sputtering out. On my way back, I passed a bus stop and a very familiar figure waiting there: Aidan Hennessy. I pulled over; he recognized my car and came to meet me.
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“What’s up?â€

 
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Dr. Leventhal, the department psychologist, was an approximately ninety-nine pound woman with lovely iron-gray curls and a very faint British accent long eroded by life in America. I’d never had the chance— or rather, the requirement— to work with her. So I was mildly surprised that she knew my name when I stuck my head in her door.
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“Detective Pribek,â€

 
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At the cemetery where the Hennessy children’s mother was buried, a marble angel stood guard over the headstone, either serenely reflecting or grieving. Below, the stone read, Elisabeth Hannelore Hennessy, Beloved Wife and Mother .
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It was a bright Sunday afternoon, and I was sitting at the graveyard’s highest point, a mausoleum with a half flight of stone stairs leading up to it. Two pine trees offered shade from the western sun, and it was here that I’d staked out a spot to watch Elisabeth’s grave and wait for the visitor I hoped was coming on the anniversary of her birth.
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For the past two days, I’d tried to put the Hennessys out of my mind. Early on, when Marlinchen had come to visit me, asking for help I’d thought I couldn’t provide, all I’d wanted was to be shed of these people. Now Marlinchen, the official head of her household, had given me