A Place of Hiding Read Online Free PDF Page A

surfboard but at a loss with girls—coming by the house and stammering an embarrassed request for a date except it wasn't embarrassment at all, was it, that first time, but rather the sweaty-palmed anticipation of collecting what he'd paid her brother to possess.
    â€œYou
sold—”
She couldn't complete the sentence.
    Cherokee turned to look at her. “He likes to fuck you, China. That's what it is. That's all it is. End of story.”
    â€œI don't believe you.” But her mouth was dry, drier than her skin felt in the heat and the wind that came off the desert, drier even than the cracked scorched earth where the flowers wilted and the rain worms hid.
    She felt behind her for the rusty knob of the old screen door. She went into the house. She heard her brother following, his feet shuffling sorrowfully in her wake.
    â€œI didn't want to tell you,” he said. “I'm sorry. I never meant to tell you.”
    â€œGet out,” she replied. “Just go.
Go.
”
    â€œYou know I'm telling you the truth, don't you? You can feel it because you've felt the rest: that something's not right between you and hasn't been for a while.”
    â€œI don't know anything of the sort,” she told him.
    â€œYeah, you do. It's better to know. You can cut him loose now.” He came up behind her and put his hand—so tentative a gesture, it seemed—on her shoulder. “Come with me to Europe, China,” he said quietly. “It'll be a good place to start forgetting.”
    She shook his hand off and turned to face him. “I wouldn't even step out of this house with you.”

December 5
6:30 A.M.
    ISLAND OF GUERNSEY
ENGLISH CHANNEL

R UTH B ROUARD WOKE WITH a start. Something in the house wasn't right. She lay motionless and attended to the darkness as she'd learned to do all those years ago, waiting for the sound to repeat so as to know whether she was safe in her hiding place or whether she should flee. What the noise had been she couldn't have said in this moment of strained listening. But it hadn't been part of the nighttime noises she was used to hearing—the creak of the house, the rattle of a window in its frame, the soughing of wind, the call of a gull roused out of its sleep—so her pulse quickened as she worried her ears and forced her eyes to discriminate among the objects in her room, testing each one out, comparing its position in the gloom with where it stood in daylight, when neither ghosts nor intruders would dare disturb the peace of the old manor house in which she lived.
    She heard nothing more, so she ascribed her sudden waking to a dream she couldn't remember. Her jangled nerves she ascribed to imagination. That and the medication she was taking, the strongest painkiller her doctor would give her that wasn't the morphine her body needed.
    She grunted in her bed, feeling a bud of pain that flowered from her shoulders and down her arms. Doctors, she thought, were modern-day warriors. They were trained to battle the enemy within till the last corpuscle gave up the ghost. They were programmed to do that, and she was grateful for it. But there were times when the patient knew better than the surgeon, and she understood she'd arrived at one of those times. Six months, she thought. Two weeks until her sixty-sixth birthday, but she'd never see her sixty-seventh. The devil had made it from her breasts to her bones, after a twenty-year respite during which she'd got sanguine.
    She shifted her position from her back to her side, and her gaze fell on the red digital numbers of the clock at her bedside. It was later than she'd thought. The time of year had utterly beguiled her. She'd assumed from the darkness that it was two or three in the morning, but it was half past six, only an hour from her usual time of rising.
    From the room next to hers, she heard a sound. But this time it wasn't a noise out of place, born of dream or imagination. Rather, it was the movement of