Unbreathed Memories Read Free Page A

wallpaper. “I’m not sure I understand either,Georgina.” I paused, waiting for her to reply. When she didn’t say anything I said, “Look, I’ve got to go help Ruth. She’s running amok in my house, feng shui-ing all over the place. Call me back later if you still want to talk.”
    “I thought that you, at least, would understand,” she said in a small, sad voice; then she hung up abruptly, leaving me with a dial tone buzzing in my ear. I shrugged and returned the receiver to its cradle, feeling like I’d just bought a one-way ticket into the Twilight Zone.
    Ruth stepped back to the kitchen table and surveyed her handiwork. “Good!” she said. Then after a few thoughtful seconds asked, “What’d Georgina want?”
    “She was asking me some damn fool questions about when we were little.”
    “Questions? Like what?” Ruth mumbled around a nail that wobbled between her lips.
    “Like when she had her tonsils out and why Mary Rose died.”
    “How odd.”
    “She says it’s to help with her therapy.”
    One eyebrow arched. “Therapy? What the hell’s she in therapy for?”
    “She’s been depressed. Although what having one’s tonsils out has to do with depression, I have no idea.”
    “I’m glad she’s getting help, Hannah, but why on earth didn’t somebody tell me about the therapy? You , for instance.”
    I poured us each a fresh cup of jasmine tea and motioned for her to join me at the table. “I didn’t think it was important.” But in less than forty-eight hours, with my hands wrapped around a similar mug of tea, I would learn how very wrong I could be.

chapter
2
    Other than to make an appointment with Dr. Bergstrom, for the next few days I didn’t worry much about my reconstructive surgery. Or about Georgina and her imaginary problems. Instead, I spent my mornings engrossed in a project an old friend at St. John’s College had steered my way. I had been temping at a local law firm, filling in for a secretary on maternity leave. I confessed to my friend over lunch at El Toro Bravo that I was glad the woman was coming back. I was pretty damned tired of doing nothing more constructive than answering the telephone and filing updates as thin as Bible pages into fat black legal loose-leaf binders.
    “Have you heard of L. K. Bromley?” my friend asked.
    Of course . Everybody had heard of L. K. Bromley, the famous mystery writer, who in her time was crowned “America’s Agatha Christie,” writing more than seventy mystery novels in a career that spanned fifty years. But few people knew that L. K. Bromley was also Nadine Smith Gray, that tweedy, straight-backed, white-haired Annapolitan who lived in a wee brick house on the cornerof College and North Streets and walked her dachshunds every day on the back campus. She looked more like a Navy widow or someone’s sweet old grandmother. So when she moved to the Ginger Cove retirement community at the ripe old age of eighty-two and left her entire library—or, rather, L. K. Bromley’s library—to the college, along with the money to process and maintain it, everyone was surprised. No one at the college could figure out why Ms. Bromley had singled out St. John’s for that honor. Maybe it was in gratitude for all the lectures she attended there, someone speculated, or the classic film series, or the privilege of letting her dogs poop on the well-manicured lawn. Ms. Bromley, as mysterious and tight-lipped as her protagonists, wasn’t saying.
    A delighted St. John’s needed someone with experience to organize and catalog the collection. I had just spent an enjoyable and productive two days perched on a low stool in a bright workroom on the southeast side of the recently renovated college library. There I sorted through Ms. Bromley’s novels, putting plastic covers on to preserve the dust jackets and deciding what to do with the large number of books that she used as references. There were guidebooks, maps, train schedules, trial transcripts, and