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Shock Point and other books by April Henry are available via the following vendors or your favorite local independent bookseller.
Independent Mystery Booksellers Association
home > books > buried diamonds > chapter twoBURIED DIAMONDS CHAPTER TWO
STUVWXY
etouring around the desiccated carcass of a dead crow, Claire ran past Portland’s Gabriel Park. At every fourth step, she exhaled just as her right heel hit the ground, the rhythm automatic. It was interrupted by a high-pitched squeal that penetrated past the buds of her headphones, startling Claire and temporarily blotting out Tori Amos singing about a man and a gun. Looking over her shoulder, Claire saw a toddler coasting to the bottom of a short orange plastic slide, her chubby arms raised in triumph.
Claire returned her attention to the road, just in time to narrowly miss stepping on the body of a plump squirrel. She leaped over it and then stopped for a moment, jogging in place. The squirrel looked whole and unharmed, if you didn’t consider the fact that it wasn’t moving and that its black bead eye never blinked. There wasn’t any blood that she could see. Overhead, telephone and power lines laced the sky. Poor thing must have lost its footing. Maybe it was only stunned. For a moment Claire imagined the squirrel getting to its feet, shaking itself and then scampering off.
But when she nudged it with her toe, it skidded a couple of inches, stiff and clearly dead. Another childish squeal made her look up. She couldn’t leave the squirrel here, not next to a line of parked cars, each with a car seat in the back. The sight of its lifeless body would surely give some poor kid nightmares for the next few months. A few feet away was a bus shelter with a garbage can. Using only the tips of thumb and forefinger, Claire leaned over and picked up the squirrel’s body, splayed and rigid, then quickly dropped it in the garbage can.
If he could see her, Dante would be horrified. Whenever she bought a pretzel from a street vendor on her visits to him in New York, he would shudder elaborately, then inform her that the pretzels had surely been languishing for months in rat-infested warehouses in Jersey. Claire would nod while licking the salt from her fingers. Now she vigorously wiped her hand on the seat of her shorts, then resumed her run. The gesture was probably just as effective as the times she had seen a mother blow on a fallen pacifier before handing it back to her baby.
Past the community center, Claire turned left. The hill rose sharply, and her legs promptly turned to lead. Each breath scoured her lungs. She was pushing forty. The days when she might (with a good tailwind, two cups of coffee, and some fast music to urge her on) possibly run a seven-minute mile were behind her. Well behind her. Finally, Claire was forced to stop and pretend to stretch.
While waiting for her heart rate and breathing to slow, she pressed her palms flat against an old stone wall, stretching her calf. The wall was made up of large gray stones about the size and shape of slightly deflated basketballs. In height, the wall was just a few inches shorter than Claire, who was five foot ten. It ran around two sides of a large yard that began well above the street. The yard’s edge was lined with arbor vitae that formed a second, living wall that began just above the rock wall. Years ago, someone had planted the bushes too close together. Now their stubby branches were interwoven as thick as Velcro. Lengthening her stretch, Claire leaned into the wall, left leg straight behind her, right knee bent, feeling the pull in the Achilles tendon. Stretching, ice, orthotics, special exercises, shoes with so much cushioning they looked like marshmallows – they were all part of Claire’s reality now, whether she liked it or not.
As she changed legs, she lifted her head for a moment. This close, the spaces between the trunks of the arbor vitae offered her a glimpse of the normally hidden house. The house was two stories; the first made of timber, the second of rough pale stucco diagonally bisected by exposed wood braces. Strips of lead cut the windows into diamond shapes. Claire supposed there was a name for this particular type of architecture, but all she knew was that the house looked English. Shakespearean. At any moment, Juliet could appear on the second floor balcony. And be surprised to find herself in this neighborhood of Sixties ranch-style houses.
Claire reached behind her, grabbed her left foot and pulled it to her buttock. Right at eye level was an inch-long chink in the wall where a piece of sandy mortar had fallen out. A spider had knit a web across the half-inch wide opening. Behind it, the hole dipped down, forming a hollow space about the size and shape of a crooked index finger. At that moment, the sun came out from behind a cloud. A ray of light glinted off something inside the chink.
Something silver and round, shining dully.
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