Beneath the Bones Read Online Free PDF Page B

to.
Especially
if you wanted to.
    So she sits and shivers and stares at the darkness. She has no idea if her eyes are open or closed, but it doesn’t matter. The view’s the same either way.
    Slender warm fingers curl over her right shoulder from behind, and warm air puffs against her ear as a voice whispers her name. A raspy scream tears loose from her throat and slices through the dark like a razor.
    • • •
    Joanne opened her eyes and saw softly glowing blue shapes hovering in the air before her. It took several seconds before she understood the shapes were numbers, and several more before she could make any sense of them.
    4:54.
    She continued staring at the numbers until she realized she was looking at the time display on a microwave. She was in a kitchen … her kitchen. She realized then that her fingers ached, and she looked down to see that she was gripping the counter so hard that her knuckles were bone white. With an effort, she relaxed her hands and let go of the counter. Her fingers were stiff and she shook out her hands to work some life back into them. She wondered how long she’d been standing here gripping the counter like that. Minutes? Hours? There was no way to know.
    Twenty years ago … but in some ways — too many — it was as if it had happened only yesterday, was
still
happening right now, this very second, and was never, ever going to stop.
    The light over the sink was on, but Joanne nevertheless walked over to the switch plate by the doorway and turned on the ceiling light with fingers she couldn’t keep from trembling. Right now, the brighter the better. She got a glass from the cupboard, went to the sink, and filled it with tap water, concentrating on keeping her hand as steady as possible. She liked the taste of bottled water much better, but she was too practical to waste money on little luxuries like that, especially on her salary. She gulped the water, not caring that some of it trickled down the sides of her face and dripped onto the front of her red silk pajama top. That and a pair of panties was all she wore when she slept, no matter the time of year or the temperature.
    When she’d finished the water, her throat still felt dry and constricted, so she refilled the glass, gratified to see that her hand no longer shook, and then sat at the small wooden table in the breakfast nook. Every morning — when she didn’t have to go in to work early, that is — she sat here with her coffee and a toasted onion bagel with butter and looked out the window as dawn came to Cross County.
    She lived five miles outside of Rhine in a small farmhouse, though she only owned a couple acres of land. When the previous owner had decided to retire after his wife passed away, he’d sold most of his property to a neighboring farmer. That man had decided to use his new land to grow Christmas trees, and while he wasn’t getting rich, he did better than many of the county’s farmers.
    Normally Joanne liked looking out her window at the regular rows of small evergreens, but she left the blinds closed for now. It was still night, and after the dream she’d had, she wanted nothing to do with darkness for a while.
    As bad as the dream had been, she was more disturbed by the fact that she’d apparently been sleepwalking. It had been a long time since she’d done that. The last time she’d slept over at Terry’s place, actually — which was
why
it had been the last time. She’d had a nightmare then, too, though she hadn’t told Terry about it. She’d never told anyone about the nightmares: not her parents, and none of the few lovers she’d had in her life. She’d never even told the therapist her mom and dad had forced her to see when she was nine. For one thing, the details faded soon after she awakened, though she never forgot the darkness and the cold. But for some reason she felt that the nightmares were a private thing, something she didn’t want to share … or perhaps wasn’t supposed