Colorblind , livre ebook

Gibson House Press - Peter Robertson

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116 pages

English

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The final volume in the Frost Trilogy finds Tom in New Orleans, where two interlocking deaths and the trail of an iconic folk singer take him to the underbelly of the Crescent City.

The journey begins in the suburbs of Chicago. An impulsive act of theft coincides with a gentle and inexplicable death. A long drive south to Louisiana follows the trail of an obscure folk singer, drowned years back in trusted waters. And before all the connections between the two deaths can be revealed, a series of hunches will lead Tom to some dark and depressing truths about the nature of fandom and the fallibility of instincts.

In the previous Permafrost and Mission, Tom was hopelessly underemployed and terminally listless. As an occasional businessman, he easily found time to track down several killers in Michigan and Colorado, respectively. In this third and final work in the series, Tom is determined to find the link between a young fan’s death in the present day, and an older singer’s decline and death in New Orleans in the confusing aftermath of Katrina.

Colorblind looks at the city of New Orleans through the eyes of a seasoned tourist and explores music both as a means of salvation and a road to obsession. Tom finds the connection between the two deaths easily enough. The tougher question of why the connection exists is harder to answer. In the hunt for answers, Tom rediscovers his own love of music, his suppressed vulnerability and the realization that, this time around, not all his hunches are good ones.

Permafrost was greeted by ALA Booklist as “a strong opening act,” while Mission was hailed as “a successful follow up.” Bestselling author Doug Stanton (In Harm’s Way and Horse Soldiers) praised both books as a “superbly smart and addictive series.”

Colorblind brings Tom’s journey to a close, with taut crime detailing, vivid local color, and the astute character observation that fans of the first two books have come to expect from this author.

Informations

Publié par	Gibson House Press
Date de parution	11 avril 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780985515881
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0025€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

COLORBLIND
A MYSTERY
Peter Robertson

ALSO BY PETER ROBERTSON
Mission
Permafrost

GIBSON HOUSE PRESS
Flossmoor, Illinois 60422
GibsonHousePress.com
© 2016 Peter Robertson
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9855158-8-1 (ePub)
Cover design: Christian Fuenfhausen

DEDICATION
for my family

One
I stood in the ruin of the front room. I was here in the pale blue house on Lizardi Avenue for the first and last time.
The house had long stood empty, tideswept and abandoned after the storm waters had destroyed and then departed. When I placed my hand on the top of the mantelpiece the wood was remarkably unspoiled, the varnished red-brown mahogany still hardy and resilient beneath a layer of dirt and dust.
Underneath the mantelpiece were exposed bricks that formed a small fireplace. Inside the hearth lay a few pieces of worn green glass attached to paper covered in a printed but illegible message.
The front room gave way to a larger living area, a dining room or possibly a bedroom at one time. A bathroom was off a hallway that led to a small galley kitchen in the back of the house. All the rooms were mostly empty but ruined and filthy, detached from their furnishings, never washed in a decade of sustained neglect.
In the hallway, strips of peeling wallpaper hung low, exposing the mottled plaster underneath. One ceiling section, wooden and tenaciously clinging to all its paint, exposed the rectangular outline of a trapdoor. Its metal handle, centered and rusty and several feet above my head, was beyond my reach.
In the kitchen a stark hole stood where the dishwasher had once belonged, while the old-style stove had been callously rejected and trashed. The plaster wall where the refrigerator had once stood was wet and crumbling to the floor, where pieces of inexpensive tile lay broken in pieces.
I went out to the overgrown back yard, where I inadvertently stumbled over a green wooden stool camouflaged in waist-high grass. It was upside down and miraculously intact.
Back inside the house, I stood on the stool and pulled hard on the trapdoor handle. After a struggle it slid slowly downwards and the steps stuck out like a metal tongue.
They were solid under my weight as I climbed.
The upstairs air was dry and segmented by shafts of sunlight.
The attic room ran the length of the house, with exposed wood beams triangulating to create a canted ceiling, low at the sides, yet high enough to let me stand up straight in the center. The space was still cool this early in the morning. The windows at each end of the attic stood half open to produce a gentle breeze.
In the center of the room, a sleeping bag folded in half had a guitar case spread across it.
Under the front window stood a wooden chair in shade, with cotton trousers folded neatly over a thin sweater. A pair of gym shoes with socks wedged inside was tucked under the chair. Beside the chair was a cheap plastic basin, with a dried-up toothbrush and tube of generic toothpaste tossed inside. A hard sliver of cracked soap lay on the floor.
On the wall by the back window a towel hung high from a nail. A decade of sun damage had leached most the color from the tattered fabric.
I held my breath and knelt down to open the guitar case. Inside was the instrument I had never expected to find. It was surely his guitar–the same instrument from the front cover of his only existing recording. There was almost no dust across the age-darkened honey maple wood, and the fretboard looked to be unbuckled and true. There were six steel strings, brittle and rusted out but still taut.
I lifted the guitar by the neck and held it. A compartment inside the case stored a black metal capo and a thin brown leather bracelet. Under the bracelet was a folded piece of notepaper. The capo was the exact same model as the one I owned.
I unfolded the paper. The lyrics of a song were inscribed neatly in permanent ink. A series of letter and number notations were written above the lines. I recognized minors and sevenths and sharps and flats, unevenly spaced but not random. This was a chord chart.
He’d titled it “Kind Words.” The title was written above a simple dedication:
For my daughter, Catriona, whom I lost.
The paper had aged to a dark yellow.
On the back windowsill, an inch of melted white candle stood in the center of a small plate like a tiny monument. I reached out and touched the candlewick. It smudged black between my fingers.
If I waited long enough, would the room reveal something of its departed? Of its antiquity?
I refolded the paper as it had been. I took the bracelet. I placed them both in my pocket. I ran my hand across the strings, praying that the wood had stayed dry. I lifted the instrument up, tightened the highest string carefully, and plucked the harmonic at the twelfth fret. I played the open string. To my ears the two notes sounded alike.
It was a hopeful sign.
I drew my hand across all six strings. I kidded myself that this was one of his elusive tunings, and not a random sampling of time and damage and desertion. I held his old guitar in my hands and I shut my eyes.
Afterwards I put the instrument inside and closed the case.
I looked around one last time. There was nothing else in the attic–no miraculously preserved notebook containing his other songs, no other parcel of lost writings, no words of either enigma or explanation.
This place on Lizardi Avenue, in the crushed heart of New Orleans, was a southern place, where there was no escape from the heat. This was the extended midpoint of my journey in a town as far south as I would travel, and the longest I would stay in one place.
The aftermath of this journey would be a matter of loose ends. My month had begun in one of Chicago’s southern suburbs on a cold spring morning, and would end on the waterfront in West Seattle on another chilly day.
The song I’d discovered would surely arrive at its intended destination. The bracelet I would also hand over, on a whim, and the guitar would be sent away, a play for time, for safekeeping, and for some gentle restoration. When it was all mended, I would decide what to do. I could wrap it up and ship it home, or I could offer to carry it there myself.
By then I would be more than ready to take another trip.
* * *
During the course of my journey I would drive over three and a half thousand miles, be proven wrong several times, and fail to answer most of the questions that I started with. All of which begs the multifaceted question: Why was I wrong so often? Why did I fail to learn anything?
Giving the matter some thought, the answer, I suspect, is that my failures illustrate a singular negative constant—the inability to recognize patterns. I couldn’t see those that actually existed, usually because I manufactured and admired the more seductive and flamboyantly false ones of my own invention. I also erred in observing that randomness can easily mimic order and vice versa, when it chooses to, or when we stubbornly try to impose our own sense of an imperative upon it.
I’m well aware that this story is not starting at the very beginning. I should apologize for that. Unfortunately, I am still somewhere in the middle.
* * *
The doggedly enduring city of New Orleans comprises a handful of long storied streets. These culturally iconic thoroughfares traverse and triumph over dirty water. They lead to areas of abject poverty and beaten down yet evocative locales that have stubborn and enduring sentimental value. Legendary streets like Chartres and Royal and Rampart are prime examples of this beguiling dual functionality. And all three of these legendary roads intersect Lizardi Avenue at some shameful juncture.
The distance between squalor and sentiment is a lot shorter than anything else in this languid place. This locale moves with southern slowness, either unwilling to break into an unseemly show of Yankee-like sweat, or risk cracking open the myth and exposing an underbelly ripe with despair.
The locals ascribe a pleasing symmetry to their town, referring to the city as a crescent. Tourists are baffled by the description. To most of us the town exists as an improbable sponge. Its low-lying land mass is intersected by brackish waters of varying sizes: lakes, rivers, canals, and drainage channels. All exhibit disparate levels of insistent menace.
Did I somehow fail to mention that the cursedly contrary place is also close to irresistible?
I did.
But I digress.
* * *
I carefully carried his guitar case down the stairs. I stood on the kitchen’s tile floor and looked back up. Then I pushed the trapdoor until it was tightly closed once again. I took the stool back outside and placed it as close as possible to the place where I had found it.
Back in the front room, I noticed the brown waterline stood a mottled and indistinct three feet above the warped wood floorboards. The smell inside the house was mostly mature mold by this late stage. A few remnants of abandoned furniture were now nothing more than kindling stacked against the far living room wall. Outside that pale blue house, the grass was thick and wild all the way to the cracked edge of the tree-twisted sidewalk.
Lizardi Avenue has no bohemian sections filled with boldly experimental charter schools and Creole/fusion restaurants. There are no above-ground cemeteries holding the remains of belatedly revered jazz pioneers rubbing marble bones with voodoo enchantresses. Their largely unremarkable lives have been histrionically embellished over the years, to vend tour tickets and plastic gimcrack talismans.
For one t