To Live and To Breathe (Could Be #2)

Chapter 38

Timothy stared at Lyman. Breathe. It dawned on him that the man before him had been asked to identify the body of someone who had died in his employment. What that might do to someone, he didn't know. "Sir, with all due respect—" he began, but was cut off.

"Find out," Lyman growled, picking up his hat and brushing past them. "Or you're both done here."

The door shut loudly behind them, and Timothy sank into a nearby chair, head in his hands. He didn't know what to say—what to think. Could anything encapsulate the rage of terror and reluctant duty he felt? He hated the power Lyman held over him, but losing his job was an idea that terrified him almost as much as the dare murderer.

"Mr. Graham was arrogant," Sam said quietly. "He probably took risks he shouldn't have. We'll be all right."

"Will we?" Timothy asked, the bitterness of sudden anger acrid on his tongue.

"I'm sure of it. Anyway, there's two of us—what have we to be frightened of?"

Timothy looked at him in complete and utter disbelief. "What have we to be frightened of? Sam, I've been frightened of every living thing ever since I was eleven and didn't have the good sense to respect a cart wheel and this—this is making me sick to my stomach. So don't ask me what we have to be frightened of. We could lose our lives!" As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Timothy wondered why he'd said them. Sam didn't need to know all of that. But he was tired—tired of corners. He didn't have the energy left to apologize for burdening Sam. He fiddled with a thread on his sleeve. "And I don't know about you," he finished feebly, "but I don't want to end my life as a sensationalist news story."

"You've got soldier's heart," Sam said gently. "My father had it too. It's all right."

Timothy rubbed his face and groaned. "Sam, I've never so much as touched a real gun. How can I have something called soldier's heart?"

Sam shook his head. "Soldiers have it most often, but I knew an elderly lady back home that couldn't go near the railroad station because she'd been in an accident once." Seeing that Timothy did not seem particularly receptive to a diagnosis, he rushed on. "I'll tell you more about it some other time. Right now we have a job to do."

Timothy watched, incredulously, as Sam marched over to Mr. Graham's desk and pulled a sheaf of papers from the drawer, then came back and plopped them on the table. "Have you no respect for the dead?" he asked, watching Sam begin to thumb through Mr. Graham's last drafts.

"I have the greatest respect for the dead," Sam replied absently, inspecting the back of one paper. "Which is why I'm going to find out who's killed three citizens of Thameton in the last month."

Timothy couldn't argue that, but it didn't make him feel any better about riffling through a near-stranger's things when he was too dead to protest. He picked up a paper and looked at it, noting that Mr. Graham's handwriting was as irritatingly perfect as the rest of his appearance had been.

For about half an hour they picked through Mr. Graham's papers, and then Sam rattled the one he was holding in triumph. "Mr. Graham told me he talked to the 'police' every morning before work, but he references them so often in his notes that it's suspicious."

Timothy raised his eyebrows. "I was more concerned with his affection for barley sugars. He seems to have spent a disgraceful amount on them." He put another candy wrapper into a growing stack.

Sam went on as if he hadn't heard. "But here he seems to have been writing hurriedly, and he mentions a John Bradley in the same way he'd been referring to the police."

"Perhaps he works for them," Timothy said, stretching to reach another wrapper that had fallen on the floor, then gasped and sat up so fast he hit his head on the table. "Ow! Of all the—did you say Bradley?"