Nancy Bush's Nowhere Bundle: Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide & Nowhere Safe. Nancy Bush

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СКАЧАТЬ stared up at the ceiling through the dark. She could hear the comfortable sounds of the refrigerator humming and the tinny voices from her neighbor’s television, which seemed to be right behind her head, set against the paper-thin wall that separated their units, her bedroom butting up against theirs.

      She fell asleep, then came to abruptly at midnight, wondering what had woken her. There was moaning from behind the wall. It had been her neighbor Jo’s last climactic shriek during lovemaking—something that happened regularly enough—that had penetrated her sleep.

      Sleep . . . That’s what some people called it, though Liv was pretty sure her sleep was different than others’; she’d learned that over the years. Hers was disturbed by images that kept coming back, creeping into a dream that had nothing to do with whatever the dream was about, images burrowing inside, memories from her childhood that simply wouldn’t go away. Gruesome visions. The kind that had sent her to Hathaway House, a place for troubled teens who were recovering from serious issues: drug addiction, suicide attempts, self-mutilation . . . whatever. She’d been sent there because she was “disturbed,” or so said her evil stepmother—yes, she really did have one—who had convinced her father to seek help for his nutso daughter. Only it hadn’t helped, apart from making Liv realize that her problems were small compared to some of the other kids’ at Hathaway House.

      But because she was underage and had no choice, Liv put in her time there and finally, much to the evil stepmother Lorinda’s dismay, had been pronounced “in recovery” sometime in what would have been her senior year of high school. She was released into her family’s care and she went on to earn her GED. She’d learned by then that the best thing to do was just not to tell anybody about the powerful images she had of her mother’s body hanging limply from a noose that had been attached to the rustic kitchen rafters of their old home. Images that stole her sleep. Images of a suicide that had left Deborah Dugan’s two children, Liv and her brother, Hague, in the hands of a stunned father who quickly took a new bride.

      Liv blinked in the darkness. The television next door was now tuned to an old sitcom that ran in the off hours and every so often the canned laughter would burst out in little fireworks of har, har, har. Liv listened to it and thought of the couple who lived adjacent to her in Apartment 21B. Young and in love, around her own age, they seemed to live on pizza and Diet Coke. At least the girl did. The guy had a penchant for beer. “Whatever’s on special,” he told Liv one day when she met them on the outdoor balcony and he was lugging a six-pack of Budweiser. They were trying to hug, kiss and giggle with each other while he also was threading the key into the lock and then they sort of fell inside and slammed the door shut behind them.

      Liv had opened her own door and was greeted by the scent of loneliness and lost opportunities.

      The next-door couple’s name was Martin and though they hadn’t formerly introduced themselves she knew the shrieker was Jo. His name started with a T . . . Travis, or Trevor, or something kind of cowboy-sounding to Liv’s mind. She should know what it was as she’d heard Jo scream it out enough times while they were making love, but it always made her feel like an auditory voyeur and therefore Liv covered her head with her pillow whenever they went at it.

      The worst of it was that their lovemaking reminded Liv of the two times she’d gotten close to sex and the third time that she’d actually gone through with it and had been left wondering, what the hell? Where were the bells and flowers and rainbows and endorphins? She’d mostly felt sort of depressed and wondering if sex, too—touted as a supposedly wonderful expression of love—was just another part of life that she wasn’t able to experience like everyone else.

      Cynical. That’s what she was. And afraid . . . afraid to open a package from someone who’d sent it to her long, long after her death.

      The following morning she went through the shower, dressed in black slacks and a black, long-sleeved T-shirt, drank a glass of orange juice and ate a piece of peanut-butter toast, her gaze on the envelope. She grabbed her purse and keys and headed out the door, then turned around abruptly and went back for the package, ripping it open while her heart pounded. She fought the crippling anxiety that sometimes overtook her and left her gasping for air and practically in the fetal position and shook the package’s contents onto the counter.

      Out tumbled several pictures and a couple of folded pages.

      She saw her mother with several other people in one of the pictures, and she staggered backward to the couch and sat down hard, the photo in her hands; the other papers flew to the floor—someone’s birth certificate among them . . . hers.

      Drawing a long breath, she tried to stem a tsunami of coming panic. Her ears roared. She couldn’t think. Couldn’t see. Could scarcely recall where she was.

      Her vision went inward, to the memory of a long ago, cool, summer evening, the air breezing inside the kitchen through the opened back door. The toes of her mother’s shoes drifted from side to side . . . her face purple . . . her tongue fat and sticking out....

      Liv squeezed her eyes shut. Attempted to shove the image into blackness, but it shone white on the insides of her eyelids like a negative. Her eyes flew open again, and for just a moment her mother was standing right in front of her.

      “I’m done,” Mama said, then the mirage poofed into mist.

      Chapter 2

      Liv drove home from the office during her noon hour, even though there really wasn’t enough time, even though she would probably skip lunch entirely. She’d left the package opened and spread across the coffee table. She couldn’t look or touch any part of it when she’d left for work this morning, but the way everything was exposed had haunted her inner vision all morning.

      Now, she took the steps up from the apartment parking lot to the second level of the L-shaped building where her apartment lay one in from the end unit. She threaded the key in the lock and pushed open the door before she felt someone behind her.

      She screamed. One short, aborted shriek and stumbled into the apartment, turning, facing the intruder.

      “Whoa, whoa! Sorry!”

      It was her neighbor, Trevor or Travis or something. He was standing there in shock, holding up his hands. Liv felt the energy drop out of her and she leaned against the wall, near collapse, quivering inside.

      Worried, he grabbed for her and said, “Geez, sorry.”

      She flinched away. “I’m okay. What . . . are you doing?”

      “Come on.” His arm was around her shoulders and he started to help her to the couch against her protests, her legs moving forward, but feeling detached from her body.

      “What do you want?” she asked, trying to keep all traces of fear from her voice.

      The pictures from the package were scattered across the coffee table as was her birth certificate and the note from her mother. She glanced at them, then at him, but he was only looking at her. “Just wanted to invite you over tonight,” he said apologetically. “Didn’t mean to freak you out.”

      “Oh.” She didn’t know what to say. She was working to get her pulse under control.

      Then his gaze swept over the photos and he focused on one where an angry-looking man was stalking toward the cameraman, his hand up as if he were about to rip the offending camera away. The same man was in several other photos with Liv’s mother, but he was always turning away, frowning, as if he didn’t want his picture taken.

      “Who’s СКАЧАТЬ