Fatal Reaction Read Online Free PDF Page B

They rocked, with Ana between them, the night before they left for the twentieth anniversary celebration from which they’d never returned. Sixteen people had died in the plane crash, but to seven-year-old Ana, this loss was the whole world.
    She lingered at the threshold for a moment of silence before salvaging the spare key from under the snow-crusted welcome mat. She turned the lock and opened the front door, nervous to face the memories.
    In twenty years, nothing had changed.
    The living room was arranged exactly the same way their mother had left it. The plaid sofa and love seat, unraveling at the seams, had been repaired more than once. Her father’s afghan hung folded over the back of her mother’s rocking chair where Sydney had read J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan to Ana every night until she moved past the fact their mother had never finished the story. It had taken more than a year, and they read the book a dozen times before she was ready for something else. Ana could still recite her favorite passages.
    Fresh tears ran down her cheeks. She let them fall, unable to stifle her grief.
    She couldn’t imagine how Sydney had lived with the memories, or how she would live with them, now that the house was hers.
    She walked up the stairs to the tiny spare bedroom that had served as Sydney’s office and sat down in the chair behind the desk. A half-empty cup of coffee on top of a coaster bore a faint pink ridge of Sydney’s lipstick. Ana brushed her fingertips along the handle and powered up the computer.
    If there was any explanation of why Sydney had gone to the Aquarian, Ana was determined to find it.
    The blue log-in screen appeared, and Ana typed her full name, “Anneliese,” the only password Sydney had ever used. She double-clicked the envelope icon and, as the messages poured in, looked over her shoulder. Being caught snooping was an irrational fear, but the reality that Sydney was gone hadn’t fully set in, and Ana felt like an intruder. The in-box quickly filled with credit card offers and messages about unclaimed foreign inheritances. Ana deleted the spam and printed bills she knew would have to be paid sooner than later. She reviewed the list of folders in the sidebar and opened one called “Divorce.” Sydney had red flagged an e-mail from Anthony, dated a week earlier. Ana clicked on it. An arrow icon announced that the message had been forwarded to Sydney’s attorney. Ana shook her head, unable to believe how far out of hand the divorce had gotten. Anthony made more of the usual threats, claims about taking the house and things that belonged to their parents if Sydney didn’t cooperate, but by the end, it seemed his temper had burned itself out. He agreed to walk away with nothing if Sydney would settle in the next couple of weeks. Ana wondered what the hurry was. Anthony had e-mailed Sydney almost daily, but whereas the others sounded humble and like he needed forgiveness, this one demanded Sydney’s cooperation and the last line was weighted with threat:
     
    This is my last offer. Agree to it. Let this all be over. Give me what I want or I’ll take it.
     
    E-mails continued to load, and Ana sorted them by sender.
    A dozen replies appeared from someone named Kristin Newman. Quick inspection of the electronic signature identified her as Dr. Dorian Carmichael’s secretary from the Oakland Street office where Sydney had been a patient.
    The uterine cancer diagnosis had hit Sydney hard, and she believed that the hysterectomy, that losing the ability to have children, was some kind of karmic punishment for secretly taking birth control. Ana told her that just wasn’t the way things worked, but she couldn’t make her sister believe it. She sifted through Kristin’s e-mails. It seemed that Sydney had contacted Dr. Carmichael’s office numerous times in recent weeks for copies of her pathology reports. Every request was met with an excuse as to why the office couldn’t provide one. Kristin’s most