Dead Ends (Main Street Mysteries Book 2) Read Online Free PDF

‘ I had no trouble with his little tests. On the other hand, when you tried to "play" along . . .’
    ‘Nobody uses analog clocks anymore,’ AnnaLise muttered. ‘How the hell should I know where the big and little hands are supposed to be?’
    ‘But you do know how to count, right?’ The suppressed grin in Daisy's tone was palpable.
    ‘I'm a word person, so sue me,’ AnnaLise exploded. ‘Besides, who counts backwards from 100? By sevens, no less.’
    ‘
And the date? I suppose – ’
    ‘Last Monday was Labor Day,’ AnnaLise snapped, ‘and a short week is always confusing. Besides, when I'm working – ’
    ‘I'm sorry, dear. I didn't realize Wisconsin was over the international dateline,’ her mother said mildly. ‘Or perhaps you time-travel at the newspaper?’
    Daisy was having way too much fun with this. And why shouldn't she? The woman had just been given a reprieve. Besides, for the most part, Daisy herself was unaware of the memory blips that AnnaLise all too clearly noticed. The lost keys or forgotten clothes in the washer didn't bother AnnaLise. Who didn't do those things occasionally? No, it was more the two incidents, both witnessed by other people, in which Daisy Griggs, the mid-life woman, slipped back into Lorraine Kuchenbacher, the teenage girl.
    It had given AnnaLise the creeps, so she'd told the doctor about them. And what had he replied?
    ‘Interesting,’ Daisy's daughter repeated, starting the car. ‘He said your memory glitches were “interesting.” And where does he get off keeping us waiting all afternoon? What could he have been doing for two hours? Performing – ’
    ‘Brain surgery?’ Daisy finished for her. ‘Could be, I suppose. Or maybe neurologists leave that to the neurosurgeons. Whichever, dear, it does no good to sputter. Besides, you went next door to the office supply store. I was the one cooling my heels in the waiting room.’
    ‘I invited you to come with me,’ AnnaLise said stubbornly. ‘And I'm not sputtering.’
    ‘Yes, you are. And for the record, even reading old magazines is preferable to following you around while you shop for printer ink and red Flair pens. Besides, I wanted to call Ida Mae and let her know we were going to be late.’
    ‘What did she say?’ AnnaLise looked at the clock – the digital clock – on her dashboard. ‘It's past five-thirty, maybe we shouldn't – ’
    ‘Honestly, you are such a worry wart, AnnaLise. Besides, we could have cut a good ten minutes off our trip if you’d taken the Blue Ridge Parkway. And we'd have gotten off before the section that spooks you.’
    The Blue Ridge Parkway runs nearly 470 miles through the mountains from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia south to Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. A breathtakingly beautiful drive with scenic vistas that drew people from all over the world, the local stretch of Parkway provided a handy shortcut between the town of Boone to the south and upper entrance of Sutherton Mountain, at least when the route wasn't packed with rubber-necking tourists.
    But it wasn't the gawkers that, in Daisy's words, 'spooked' AnnaLise. Her problem started at the Parkway's Milemarker 303.4, the Linn Cove Viaduct. The viaduct skirted Grandfather Mountain, essentially Sutherton Mountain's big brother to the west, so as not to destroy that mountain's delicate ecosystem. Seeing it from a distance, you would swear the snaking concrete span and the vehicles crossing it were suspended in thin air. And they were. Above forty-one hundred feet of nothingness.
    AnnaLise didn't like nothingness. In fact, she even hated the viaduct which performed the same function on their own mountain. Not nearly as long or impressive – a simple ‘c’ curve tucked against the mountain, as opposed to the Linn Cove Viaduct's long sweeping ‘s’ – the Sutherton version had been dubbed simply a "bridge" rather than the more pretentious "viaduct." Semantics aside, Sutherton Bridge still