Twilight Hunger. Maggie Shayne

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СКАЧАТЬ in inexplicable dread.

      It was me. My aunt had come for me. I knew it in my soul. What she wanted of me, I could not guess. How I knew it, this was a mystery. But I was certain to the core of me that she did have a reason for returning in the face of such hatred.

       And the reason … was me.

      Slowly, slowly, the smoke from the Gypsy campfire thinned. The light thrown by the flames dulled, and the heat—so real she had sworn she could feel it on her face—went cold.

      Morgan De Silva blinked out of the fantasy. She was not looking at a Gypsy campfire through the huge dark eyes of a small boy. She was sitting on the floor of a dusty attic, staring down at the time-yellowed pages of a handwritten journal, bound in leather covers so old they felt buttery-soft against her hands. The vision painted by the words that spiderwebbed across the aging pages had been vivid. It had been … real. As real as if she’d been in that Gypsy camp in the distant past, instead of on the coast of Maine in the early spring of 1997.

      Morgan turned the page slowly, eager to read on….

      The ringing of the telephone, floating faintly from no small distance, stopped her. With a resigned sigh, she closed the large volume and returned it carefully to the aged trunk, atop a stack of others just like it. When she closed the trunk’s lid, its hinges groaned and a miniature explosion of dust puffed out at her. Brushing her hands against each other, then her jeans, she blew out the candles that were the only source of light in the room and hurried down the narrow, steep attic stairs.

      She hadn’t expected to find a thing up there other than cobwebs and dust. Exploring more of the ramshackle house had been an experiment in procrastination, not an act of curiosity. If her own work had been going anywhere, she never would have bothered poking around this aging, sagging house at all.

      And that would have been a crying shame.

      She ran through the hallway, between walls of crumbling plaster, the lath beneath it visible in places, to the next set of stairs. These were wider, but not in much better repair than anything else around the place. The third step from the top was missing a board, and she skipped it automatically and trotted the rest of the way down as the phone kept on ringing.

      If it were another lawyer or bill collector, she thought breathlessly, she would hunt them down and kill them.

      The wide staircase emptied itself into a huge room that must have been glorious once, a century or so ago. Now it was filled with nothing but heartbroken echoes and a tangle of bare wires sticking out of the domed ceiling, where some magnificent chandelier must have once been. Beyond that room, through a pair of double doors, was her room. Her … office. For the moment, at least. But only until she earned back her fortune and returned to L.A. in triumph.

      Pretty much the opposite of the way she had left.

      Her heart was pounding from exertion by the time she got that far, and she was out of breath, slightly dizzy, and pressing one hand to her chest. Ridiculous for a twenty-year-old woman to tire so easily, but there it was. She had never been healthy, and she knew she wasn’t ever going to be. But at least her condition hadn’t begun to worsen yet. It was too soon. She had so many things to do.

      Finally Morgan snatched up the telephone, which was as antiquated as the rest of the place. The handset weighed at least two pounds, she guessed, and the rotary dial seemed to mock her high-tech tastes.

      If her “hello?” sounded irritated, it was because she was dying to read more of those journals up in the attic, to find out more about their author. She might be on the verge of admitting that she was a talentless hack, but she still knew good writing when she read it, and what she had been reading upstairs was good writing. Painfully good.

      “Morgan? What took you so long? I was getting worried.”

      Her irritation fled at David Sumner’s familiar voice. Her honorary uncle—a title she’d stopped using long ago—was the only person who hadn’t turned his back on her when she had gone from spoiled rich girl to penniless orphan in a matter of hours. He was the one person she didn’t mind hearing from just now.

      “Hey, David,” she said. “I was just. exploring. This place is huge, you know.”

      “No, I don’t know, never having laid eyes on it. You sound a little out of breath.”

      “Two flights of stairs will do that.”

      She noticed his hesitation. He tended to worry about her far more than he should.

      “How is the place, anyway?” he asked at length.

      “It’s a wreck,” she told him, her tone teasing, partly because she was trying to ease his mind and partly because she enjoyed teasing him. “Which serves you right for buying it sight unseen. Who does stuff like that?”

      She could almost see his puckered face, the laugh lines around his eyes, his balding head. David had been her best friend for as long as she could remember. “A friend of the family,” her parents had always called him. But it had seemed to Morgan that he’d barely tolerated the family.

      Of course, he had known the truth about her parents all along. She had only learned it recently, through tabloid headlines and courtroom vultures.

      “I bought it for the location, and you know it,” David told her. “And I trust my real estate guru on such matters. The building is coming down, anyway.”

      “Yes, it is,” Morgan said. “As we speak.”

      He was quiet for a moment. “That bad, huh?”

      She could have slapped herself. Sometimes she could be such a self-centered little … “It’s not,” she said quickly. “I was joking.” She looked around her at the room she had chosen to inhabit. It had been somebody’s library or study once upon a time.

      She thought of the little boy she had been reading about and wondered if it had ever been his. In his older years, perhaps, when he had decided to write his memoirs.

      From the corner of her eye, she saw him. A dark, broad-shouldered form bent over the desk, with a quill pen in his long, graceful hand. Her heart jumped, and she caught her breath and turned toward him. But there was nothing. No man, no form, no quill pen. Just her computer with its electric blue screen. Whatever she had seen was there and then gone. A vision. A thought form. A little overactivity of her imagination, perhaps.

      A shiver worked its way up her spine, but she shook it away.

      “Describe it to me,” David was saying.

      “What?” she asked, dragging her eyes away from the old desk.

      “The house. Describe it to me.”

      She flicked her gaze toward the desk again. No one there. Sighing, she tried to comply with David’s request. “It must have been incredible once. The scrollwork around the fireplace mantle is worn and faded, but lavish. I think it’s hardwood. You’re going to want to take that entire piece out before you tear it down. And there’s hand-tooled casing that borders every one of the tall windows. This place has … I don’t know. Something.”

      “It’s far from what you’re used to, though,” David said.

      “Yeah, well, СКАЧАТЬ