Tidings of Fear. Ericka Scott

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Sylvie’s disappearance. According to the police, she had called in the missing person’s report. A niggle of doubt called to mind all the other cases where once lovers had murdered their partners. Lia pushed the thought away impatiently.

      Instead, she focused on the other tidbit of information the officer had dropped. Sylvie had a son. Wow. What a shock. Sylvie had always professed never to want children and often joked that she didn’t have a maternal bone in her body. Well, something had changed.

      Lia twirled on the kitchen stool where she’d perched to answer the phone. Amazing that her small efficiency apartment could be so crowded and cluttered. The sink overflowed with dirty dishes and, off to left, a pile of laundry mounded up the side of the washer. Luckily, she’d finished a photo shoot and submitted all the shots to her publisher, so she could take off at a moment’s notice. However, she’d probably better clean the place up a bit.

      She picked up the receiver to place a call to the airline. With her finger poised over the buttons, a series of beeps startled her. It sounded as if someone were already dialing a number. She hung up the phone and took a deep breath. Were the sounds real, or were they a sign she needed to pay attention to? Damn it, she hated when she couldn’t tell reality from a psychic impression. She picked up the receiver and again, the sounds repeated. This time, she left the phone off the hook. The call never connected, the tones simply repeated, two, perhaps three more times. Too bad she’d never memorized what sound went with which number. Perhaps if she hummed the tune, she’d remember it. She tried and then gave up.

      Unexpectedly, tears flooded her eyes. Having unique psychic abilities weren’t good for anything if she couldn’t utilize the clues presented. “Dammit,” she shouted into her empty apartment. “At least give me something I can use.” She slammed the receiver down and slid off the stool. On one last hope of being able to call the airlines for a reservation, she picked up the handset. The now-familiar tune played in her ear.

      With a sigh, she put the receiver down. Gently this time. Laundry, dishes, then pack. She’d make airline reservations via the internet.

      By eleven that evening, Lia’s apartment sparkled. Well, not really, but it looked cleaner, anyway. She had been able to book a seat on the first flight out in the morning, which meant she’d have to be at the airport before dawn.

      Before going to bed, she gathered all her unread newspapers to throw into the apartment complex recycling bins. She really should consider canceling her subscription, but having a newspaper delivered made her feel informed and connected.

       Informed, my ass. That only works if you read the darn things.

      Huge blue, green and red bins were kept at the bottom of the stairwell. Taking a page out of her sister’s book, she tucked the papers under one arm. After locking the door, she placed her keychain with its accompanying can of mace into her pocket and kept her hand in the pocket. Not that she really worried. She lived in a secure building, a doorman limiting access to residents and their guests. But still, this was New York.

      The stairway smelled musty, rather like dirty socks left too long in the quarterback’s locker. She made it all the way down to the first floor before the overhead fluorescent light flickered. It dimmed and brightened eight times, then it went out. As she continued down, she found herself counting the steps. Eight between each landing. Granted, she’d never counted them before, but it struck her as odd. What was it with the number eight today?

      She hefted her load of newspapers and prepared to throw them into the big blue bin when she noticed something odd. Every paper in the bin appeared to be folded identically. Not rolled, as if they’d never been opened like hers were. But opened to expose page twenty-three where the horoscopes, a few black and white cartoons, and a large crossword puzzle resided. Lia shifted the top layer to the side. The papers below were all the same, and she had the suspicion that if she searched all the way to the bottom of the bin, she’d not find one paper out of sync.

      She dumped her armful on top and turned her back. On impulse, she reached back into the bin and pulled out one of the folded papers. It might not mean anything, but she’d learned never to ignore the signs.

      Those cryptic messages sent from who-knows-where had saved her life on more than one occasion. Was it her turn to save someone else? However, after the things Sylvie had said to her in the past, her sister probably didn’t want her help.

      Stifling the memory, she trudged back upstairs where she locked the door, undressed and then crawled into bed. The sheets were cool and smelled of fabric softener from their recent romp in the dryer. She fluffed her pillows and tried to relax, clearing her mind and preparing for sleep. Unbidden, thoughts and snippets of past conversations, make that arguments, with her sister kept intruding.

      Although eight years older, Sylvie had been her best friend. Even after they’d grown apart, Lia still admired her tall, beautiful, smart sister. Their parents had treated them the same. Although she knew in her heart they worried just a little more about their youngest daughter, Lia, who couldn’t remember to turn in her homework, and who spent more time dreaming than studying. Then came the summer she turned twelve. She began having odd experiences. Her mother and sister wrote it off as imagination, or worse, to the onset of her menstrual cycle. Lia, sensing that there were some things a girl didn’t talk about, began hoarding the impressions to herself. If she were a skeptic, she’d write all those things off as coincidence or happenstance, especially when the clues came in signs. A dead bird on the sidewalk, a dog barking three times right before she heard the same song repeated three times on the radio, or seeing blood dripping from the exhaust of a car.

      Lia shuddered.

      It had all come to a peak the summer she turned twenty. Lia attended college and her sister worked full time in DC when their parents set off to Italy for their second honeymoon.

      The signs that morning came fast and furious. A line of dead flies on the window sill, blood pouring from the water fountain, an icon weeping blood in the local church, the sound of an airplane engine sputtering every time she walked out the door. Lia tried to ignore them, tried not to piece the clues together. She almost convinced herself it was only imagination, that nothing bad lurked over the horizon. The minute her parents’ flight took off, the odd occurrences stopped and Lia sighed in relief. The call came later that evening. Her mom and dad had been robbed and murdered within hours of stepping off the plane.

      She could have stopped it.

      A headache burned behind her eyes. Lia rolled out of bed and padded to the bathroom after aspirin. She looked at the bedroom clock as she passed. Eight. What? She squinted out the window. Still dark. Shaking her head, she swallowed the tablets and made her way back to bed. She picked up the alarm clock. The display now read three thirty-three. How had she gotten an eight out of that? She put the clock back down and curled up on her side. Somewhere, a cricket chirped. She found herself counting along with the sounds. One, two…the insect fell silent at eight. Although she strained to hear something further, no more chirps broke the silence. Had it died. Or…

      Dragging her mind back to the present, she sighed. Morning would come far too early. She had to get some sleep or she’d be useless in helping to find her sister.

      When sleep finally took hold, dreams made her toss and turn. The number eight danced through everything—sometimes typewritten and sometimes in fancy script on a door or wall. In one dream, the animated number ran up and down stairs resembling the blocks of a crossword puzzle. She even dreamed of taking a picture of the number, immeasurably pleased with the print. Then the dreams morphed, and she returned to the big pink house where she’d grown up.

      Her childhood home, a lovely Victorian painted lady that had been her mother’s СКАЧАТЬ