The Color Of Night Read Free

soul-consuming afterbirth of death had passed and he was left with the silence and the solitude, he had returned to the rhythms of the water and the light to try to steady himself all over again. Even in Romy’s absence, he found himself turning to her for help, to her idea of a proper ceremony for rebirth and a new beginning.
     
     
    The woman in the black Lycra tank suit came to swim laps beside him in the long empty pool every day for twelve consecutive days. She swam exactly half an hour. Sometimes she was there when he arrived, though she seemed to have preceded him by only minutes, and left while he was still swimming. Sometimes she came after he was already well into his laps, and she was still there when he left. Either way, for nearly two weeks they shared the same water and the same silence and the same light.
    During those days it had happened a few times, by sheer chance, that they would swim for a while in tandem, and as he turned his head to the side with every other stroke of his arm, he would see her long, sleek body slipping through the water as smoothly as it had ever been done, perhaps as smoothly as it could be done. Her form was impeccable. Then, gradually, his longer strokes would separate them again, and he would see her only in passing.
    The twelve days they swam together were odd in just about every respect. Inevitably during that time their eyes connected briefly, but neither of them ever acknowledged the other. They never spoke. Yet by the twelfth day Strand had grown comfortable with her company, something he would not have expected. If he had been told in advance that another person would begin swimming with him at the exact same hour, he would have resented the intrusion immensely. It would have ruined everything that he sought in that particular hour of the day.
    As it turned out, that hadn’t happened. Very quickly, by the fifth day, he had begun to accept that she was going to be there. She possessed a discernible serenity that easily counterbalanced what he would otherwise surely have considered a disruption. She blended remarkably well into the equation he sought in those sequestered mornings.
    Then she stopped coming. That had been over a month ago, and he hadn’t seen her since.
    He had inquired about her. The swimming club was private and very discreet. The only thing he could learn about her was that her name had been listed as Mara Song, recently arrived in Houston from Rome. No address, of course, and no telephone number were available to him. For an instant he thought about leaving a message for her at the club, in the event that she had begun swimming at another time of day, then immediately rejected that as being far too overt. In fact, he didn’t know why he wanted to meet her at all. Just about everything argued against it. If he wanted companionship, if he wanted to begin seeing someone, it didn’t have to happen like this. He knew a number of women who were respectfully keeping their distance—some keeping less of a distance than others, to be sure—waiting for him to decide to resume his life.
    He was also aware of the irony of what he wanted. He could easily have spoken to her a dozen times—literally—during the two weeks she had joined him in the water, but he hadn’t. Now that he couldn’t, he wanted to.
    So, with some effort, he tried to put the prospect of meeting Mara Song out of his mind. It didn’t really make any sense. But he never swam now without thinking of her, thinking that at any moment she might suddenly be there, slipping through the light-illumined water, a dizzy trail of bubbles shimmering behind her like a visible scent.
     
     
     

CHAPTER 3
     
     
    After leaving the club, Strand went slightly out of his way home to a small neighborhood bakery with a dozen tables under a rattan-covered patio surrounded by catalpa trees. Every morning Strand was the first of a loyal clientele to arrive.
    He always sat at the same table in the patio, the