Grimm: The Killing Time Read Online Free PDF

of beer in his hand. He hadn’t opened it yet, and in truth, he’d forgotten he was holding it. He was too concerned about his wife.
    Dana sat at the small table—there was only the two of them, and they didn’t need anything larger—hunched over an open carton of ice cream. Butter pecan, to be exact. She was shoveling huge spoonfuls into her mouth and swallowing them down without bothering to chew. Rich was afraid she might choke, but if she was aware of the danger, she didn’t seem to care. The lower half of her face was smeared with ice cream and blobs of it were melting on the table around her. When she’d arrived home, Rich had been in the front room watching pro wrestling on TV. He knew it was fake, but he loved it anyway. The colorfully named characters, the heroes and villains… It was like watching a comic book come to life. Dana hated wrestling, though. No,
hate
wasn’t a strong enough word for it. She
loathed
it, so he only watched it when she wasn’t home. When she arrived tonight, carrying a bag of groceries, he’d been so caught up in the match—a showdown between two archrivals—that at first he didn’t hear her come in. When he finally noticed her standing there, front door still open and staring at the TV screen, he’d expected her to make some sort of disparaging remark, something along the lines of, “Aren’t you too old to be watching this junk?” or, “Glad to see you’re making yourself useful while I’m out.” But she hadn’t said anything. She’d just closed the door—without locking it, which was weird because she was almost OCD when it came to locking doors—and then headed to the kitchen without saying a word.
    He’d tried returning his attention to the match, but he couldn’t get back into it, not after Dana’s strange entrance. So he turned off the TV, got off the living room couch, and went into the kitchen. He’d found the groceries sitting out in the hallway, as if she’d been too impatient, or maybe just absent-minded, to put them on the kitchen counter. She was sitting at the table, just starting to dig into the ice cream. That had been only a few minutes ago, and in that time he’d taken a beer out of the fridge and held it while Dana devoured butter pecan. As near as he could tell, she’d managed to polish off three-quarters of the container so far, and she showed no signs of stopping before she’d eaten the entire thing.
    Something was wrong, that much was obvious, but he was hesitant to ask her what it might be. She wasn’t the type of person who ate when she was upset or depressed. She was more the hold-me-while-I-cry type. So whatever had happened to make her want to go on an ice-cream binge, he figured it had to be pretty bad.
    He raised the beer bottle to his mouth, intending to take a sip and stall for another moment, but he’d forgotten he hadn’t opened it, and he hit one of his eyeteeth on the cap.
    “Ow! Damn it!”
    Dana was usually so attentive to her husband that she hurried toward him whenever he hurt himself, even if only in the smallest of ways. But she didn’t even look up, just continued gorging herself, oblivious.
    Rich put the bottle on the counter, stepped over to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat.
    “Did something happen in class tonight?” he asked. “Or on the way home? Maybe when you stopped for groceries?’
    She kept eating, one heaped spoonful after another. He could hear the spoon scrape the bottom of the container now, and he knew she’d almost polished it off. He wanted to reach out and take her hand, but he couldn’t bring himself to. For the first time since they’d been married, hell, in the entire time that he’d known her, he was scared of her.
    “Dana, please talk to me.”
    She lifted the last spoonful of ice cream, swallowed it, and then licked the spoon clean. She examined the inside of the empty container, and her lower lip protruded in a pouty expression that made her look like a disappointed