Now You See Her Linda Howard(13)

She didn't want to be different. She had seen her parents use their talent as an excuse for all sorts of god-awful, selfish, self-aggrandizing behavior, and seen the havoc they had wrought in other people's lives. She didn't want to be like that. She wanted to be a perfectly normal person who happened to have a talent for painting; that was different enough, but she could handle that. But an artist who screwed up electronic timers, affected nature, and saw ghosts—whoa, that was way out there. Not even her mother had gone that far, though she had gone through a period when she sought inspiration in the metaphysical. As Sweeney remembered it, that had consisted mostly of toking on a joint. Excuses were where you found them.

She sighed as she cleaned her brushes. The St. Lawrence was out of the question today, not that she had been making much progress anyway. The river didn't fascinate her the way it once had, didn't hold the lure of even the most ordinary face.

The hot dog vendor's face popped into her mind, complete with sweet smile. Sweeney cocked her head, considering the image. He looked so young in her mind, despite the gray hair. How had he looked when he was twenty? Or ten? She thought of him as a six-year-old with here-and-there teeth, beaming at the world.

Absently whistling through her teeth, Sweeney reached for her sketch pad. It would be interesting to do him at different ages, a collage of faces on the same canvas and all of them his.

Some artists only did rough blocking to get the right proportions, but Sweeney was a good sketch artist, too. She usually spent more time than she should on the preliminary sketches because she couldn't resist adding in shadings and details. To her delight, the vendor's sweet expression didn't elude her pencil this time. Everything fell into place, in a way it hadn't done in a long time.

The vendor's name was Elijah Stokes. Today he closed his stand at the usual time, counted the day's take, and made out a deposit slip, then walked to the bank and stood in line for maybe fifteen minutes.

He could have dropped the deposit in the overnight slot, but he liked to deal with humans, not holes.

He liked to walk away with the stamped deposit receipt in his pocket, and the first thing he did when he got home was put the receipt in a file. He was real careful with his paperwork, partly because his mama had been that way, but mostly because, as he grew older, he saw that being careful with the details always saved him some trouble on down the line.

Elijah had been married to the same woman for forty-four years, until her death five years before. They had raised two fine boys, put them through college, and had the pleasure of seeing them become fine men, get good jobs, marry, and begin raising their own families as they had been raised. There was a lot of satisfaction in knowing you had done something right, and Elijah knew he had done right by his boys.

He could have closed his stand a long time ago; he had saved his money, made some small but careful investments, and seen them prosper. He didn't need the money; with Social Security and his dividends, he could live just as he was living now, because most of what he made still went into savings. But every time he thought about retiring, he'd think about his boys, and the five beautiful grandchildren he had, and how every penny he saved now would help pay for their education later. It wouldn't hurt him to work a couple of more years; seventy seemed like a good age to retire.



The rain began again as he walked home, driving people off the sidewalks. He just pulled his cap down more snugly on his head and trudged on. A little rain never hurt nobody. The clouds had brought on an early twilight, making the streetlights wink on. Summer was leaving in a hurry; he could smell the crispness of fall in the rain, as if it had come straight down from Canada. Spring and fall were his favorite seasons, because the weather was better, not too hot and not too cold. He hated winter; the cold made his bones ache. Sometimes he thought about going south to retire, but he knew he wouldn't leave his boys and those grandkids.

He was still three blocks from home when the neighborhood began to deteriorate. Some rough characters hung around the streets these days. His kids wanted him to move, but he had lived there since the oldest was only a year old, and it was hard to leave all those memories. His wife had cooked thousands of mouthwatering meals in that old kitchen, and he had listened to his kids running across those worn floors. His wife had fixed the place up nice over the years, though he hadn't done anything to it since she died and everything was beginning to look shabby. He just hadn't wanted to make any changes. Somehow he could remember her better if he left things just the way she'd wanted.

Normally he paid more attention when he was walking, but this time, this one time, he let his guard down. A punk slid out of an alley to block his way, feral eyes gleaming. Elijah barely had time to notice the pimply complexion and bad teeth before the left side of his head exploded with pain.

The force of the blow knocked Elijah to the ground. The punk leaned down and grabbed the old man, dragged him back into the shadows. Maybe four seconds had lapsed since he had stepped out of the alley. He swung the club two more times, just because it felt good, even though the old man hadn't struggled at all. Then he leaned down and grabbed the wallet from the old guy's pocket and fumbled the money out, shoving it into his own pocket without bothering to count it. There weren't any credit cards. Shit. In disgust he tossed the wallet aside and pelted out of the alley, head down. The whole operation, refined by practice, took about twenty seconds.

Elijah Stokes, a careful man, never carried much cash on him. The punk's take was twenty-seven dollars. Elijah lay in the twilight shadows of the alley and felt the light rain on his face, but the sensation was oddly distant. In a brief flash of clarity he knew he was dying, and he wanted to think about his kids, but his brain felt funny and their faces just wouldn't form. His wife, though… ah, there she was, smiling her angel's smile, and that was good enough for Elijah.