The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel Read Free

in his voice.
    “Got time for another drink?” Irene asked. She had reapplied her lipstick in the bathroom.
    “Sure,” George said. “But let’s go somewhere else. We could walk a little bit while it’s still light.”
    Irene signaled the waiter, and George reached for his wallet. “My turn, remember,” Irene said and removed a credit card from her bottomless purse. While she paid the check, Liana walked past again. This time George could stare at her retreating figure, that familiar walk. She’d grown into her body too. George thought she’d been his ideal in college, but if anything she looked better now: long tapering legs and exaggerated curves, the kind of body that only genetics, not exercise, will ever get you. The backs of her arms were pale as milk.
    George had imagined this moment many times but had somehow never imagined the outcome. Liana was not simply an ex-girlfriend who had once upon a time broken George’s heart; she was also, as far as George still knew, a wanted criminal, a woman whose transgressions were more in line with those of Greek tragedy than youthful indiscretion. She had, without doubt, murdered one person and most likely murdered another. George felt the equal weights of moral responsibility and indecision weigh down upon him.
    “Coming?” Irene stood, and George did as well, following her brisk heel-first pace along the painted wooden floors of the bar. Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” rat-a-tatted on the speakers. They swung through the front doors, the still-humid evening greeting them with its wall of stale, steamy air.
    “Where to next?” Irene asked.
    George froze. “I don’t know. Maybe I just feel like going home.”
    “Okay,” Irene said, then added, when George still hadn’t moved, “or we could just stand out here in the rain forest.”
    “I’m sorry, but I suddenly don’t feel so great. Maybe I’ll just go home.”
    “Is it that woman at the bar?” Irene arched her neck to peer back through the frosted glass of the front door. “That’s not what’s-her-name, is it? That crazy girl from Mather.”
    “God, no,” George lied. “I think I’ll just call it a night.”
    George walked home. A breeze had picked up and was whistling through the narrow streets of Beacon Hill. The breeze wasn’t cool, but George held out his arms anyway and could feel the sweat evaporating off his skin.
    When George got to his apartment, he sat down on the first step of the exterior stairway. It was only a couple of blocks back to the bar. He could have one drink with her, find out what brought her to Boston. He had waited so long to see her, imagining the moment, that now, with her actually here, he felt like an actor in a horror flick with his hand on the barn door about to get an ax in his head. He was scared, and for the first time in about a decade he longed for a cigarette. Had she come to Jack Crow’s to look for him? And if so, why?
    On almost any other night, George could have entered his apartment, fed Nora, and crawled into his bed. But something about the weight of that particular August night, combined with Liana’s presence at his favorite bar, made it seem as though something was about to happen, and that was all he needed. Good or bad, something was happening.
    George sat long enough to begin to believe that she must have left the bar. How long would she really sit there by herself with her glass of red wine? He decided to walk back. If she was gone, then he wasn’t meant to see her again. If she was still there, then he’d say hello.
    As he walked back to the bar the breeze pressing against his back felt both warmer and stronger. At Jack Crow’s, he didn’t hesitate—he swung back through the door and, as he did, Liana, from her spot at the bar, turned her head and looked at him. He watched her eyes brighten a little in recognition. She had never been one for outsize gestures.
    “It is you,” he said.
    “It is. Hi, George.” She said it with the flat