Fantasy Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

except that Emily was picking up Spanish from Inez’s soap operas. Sometimes people learned things in spite of themselves.
    Lyssa passed Emily’s room to get to the den. Emily’s bed was made and her clothes were folded in the laundry basket—a small miracle that didn’t seem like one Sophia could have gotten her to perform. The book Emily had been reading,
Little Women,
which she had discovered on her own, was gone from the nightstand.
    Lyssa smiled. Emily was probably sitting on the porch, engrossed in the adventures of Jo, Beth, and Marmee.
    The house seemed quiet enough for that. If Emily was reading, it seemed odd that Sophia wasn’t inside, talking on the phone, listening to the radio, or watching television. Maybe they had walked to Randall Street. But it seemed too hot to do that as well. Sophia rarely showed that kind of initiative.
    Lyssa peered into the den. The television was off, and so was the computer. No one sat on the dingy secondhand couch she’d found at a nearby yard sale. The book Emily planned to read next,
Little Men,
still rested on the edge of the oak bookshelf, where Emily kept all of her to-read pile.
    No Sophia, no Emily, and now Lyssa was getting nervous.
    A movement caught her eye. She looked through thewindow into the backyard. Sophia was running from bush to bush, and she was shaking them frantically.
    Lyssa had never seen Sophia that active. Her loose cotton dress was covered with sweat, and her blond hair was falling out of its bun.
    That wasn’t good. That wasn’t good at all.
    Lyssa started for the window to shout out of it, to find out what was going on, then changed her mind. Her neighbors at the lake house had always learned her business, and it had become a nightmare—one, she suspected, that had led to the press finding out about Reginald. This time, she wanted to keep her problems to herself.
    She ran through the house and out the back door. The screen banged shut.
    Sophia stopped near the overgrown rosebush as if she had been caught robbing a bank. She turned slowly, hands up, as if to show she had nothing in them.
    “Mrs. Walters,” she said, her voice shaking.
    Lyssa froze at the top of the porch steps. Sophia hadn’t called her Mrs. Walters since the divorce was final in May. Sophia had been very careful to learn Lyssa’s new last name—actually her old last name, her maiden name—and to use it whenever she could.
    This slip, and the fact that Sophia didn’t seem to notice she’d made it, alarmed Lyssa as much as Sophia’s behavior had.
    “I do not know what happened,” Sophia said. “One minute, she was here. The next, I do not know. She does not come when I yell.”
    Lyssa was having trouble taking a breath. Her worst nightmare was coming true: Emily had been abducted, just like those poor girls on TV a few years ago. Children disappearing right out of their yard.
    The air seemed still. Next to her, a bee buzzed its way across the pioneer roses that grew below the porch. The heatseemed worse than it had all day, and for a moment, Lyssa thought she was going to faint.
    Then she remembered to take a breath. She could handle anything. She had learned that with Reginald. She just had to remember it.
    Reginald. A shiver ran through her despite the heat. He had stayed away from Emily so far—Lyssa wasn’t even sure he knew where they lived—but things could change. And Reginald might have had a serious mental illness, but he was always bright. Too bright.
    Lyssa made herself walk down the steps. “When did you see her last?”
    Sophia looked away. It was an obvious pretext so that she wouldn’t have to look in Lyssa’s eyes. “I do not know. I believe after lunch.”
    After lunch was hours ago, if Emily ate at her usual twelve. Anything could have happened in the space of hours.
    Lyssa wanted to scream at Sophia, but she knew that screaming would do no good. It took all of Lyssa’s self-control to ask the next question.
    “When after lunch exactly? It’s