Death Qualified Read Online Free PDF

when he scrambled over the piles of stuff in the loft. The box was there. He pulled it out, tucked it under his arm, and went back down the ladder and outside. A little boy was standing there, watching Lucas soberly.
     
        "Hi. You got hurt."
     
        Lucas looked down at his hand. All that blood. Good Christ, all that blood!
     
        He hurried past the child, back into the woods; on the path there he began to run.
     
        FOUR
     
        some summer days the river resembled a sleeping exotic snake, hardly moving, hardly breathing; those days it shone green with silver scales. Sometimes it was liquid silver flowing around quiet patches as blue as cornflowers;
     
        or, mirrorlike, it became luminous and as dazzling as fallen sky. Earlier in the season it was pale gray, its spring-fed, lake-fed water mixed with ice water fresh from the glaciers in the Cascades, racing, running deep and swift as if its mission then was to cool the ocean, and it was an overly conscientious servant intent on carrying out its duty.
     
        In winter it often turned black and looked deceptively sluggish. Now and again a raft of snow escaped from the banks, bobbed, spun in a delirious pirouette, rose and fell, dwindling, always dwindling, finally to drown in a frenzy of tumultuous death throes.
     
        Logs twisted and twirled their way downstream; they often got caught on rocks and thrashed like living creatures trying to shake a trap. The river toyed with the logs;
     
        it sometimes held one end fast and let the other rise higher and higher only to crash it down eventually like a thunderclap.
     
        Other objects tumbled their way downstream: a canoe paddle, a float from fishing gear, an elk, a coyote, a black bear once, Styrofoam remains from picnic packaging, cups.. ..
     
        The river laughed, it whispered, it roared. It had songs of its own. And secrets. It knew silence and sighs. The dawn sun cast silver on the water; at evening it spun gold.
     
        Here at Turner's Point was the last stretch of untamed water in the river. Ten miles downstream was a dam;
     
        around the point the river widened and became ever calmer until it turned into a brilliant blue lake that was so cold whole trees had been preserved upright in its water.
     
        Trees and water. Water and trees. Fir trees with shadows so dense that only creatures and plants that thrived in near darkness lived there. The ground was a mat of needles, deep and resilient; weathered lava rocks erupted through it here and there. After the fall rains, and again in the spring, mushrooms appeared in exuberant abundance.
     
        On the far side of the river, opposite Turner's Point, a cliff rose thirty feet. Downstream, the cliff became one of the boundaries of the lake, and upstream, a hundred feet high, or even higher, it was a sheer vertical barrier to the river. On this side of the river the land rose less steeply;
     
        there was room for the highway, for Turner's Point with its several dozen buildings, the general store and gas station, and fishing camps with cabins so close together that, unless seen straight on, they looked like one long structure.
     
        Behind the store, fifteen feet above the river, was a gravel parking lot with a paved drive to a boat ramp. The cabins stopped at a boulder forty feet high, double that at the base, moss-covered, encrusted with pale green and red lichen, with two straggly fir trees sticking out awkwardly over the river.
     
        If the boulder had not come to rest right there, Nell Kendricks could have walked the half mile from her riverfront yard to the store at Turner's Point, but the boulder had tumbled and rolled and finally lodged at that point, and she had to drive, first on a private road, then almost a mile on a county road, and finally half a mile on the state highway. At Turner's Point the highway veered away from the river to start its tortuous