Home Before Dark Read Online Free PDF

Trinita bridge. She
hated the idea of letting Sophie’s family down – felt doubly
guilty because she should’ve told them what she knew a long
time ago – but she couldn’t take the risk now.
She wasn’t prepared to die for people she’d never met.
It wasn’t as if she’d been all that friendly with Sophie.
The girl had come up to her after a British Council lecture,
claiming to be interested in early Renaissance ceramics.
Sam, whose field it was, had taken her under her wing. A
sweet kid, beautiful, talented, innocent, and yet – Sophie
Lister had turned out, disappointingly, to be keener on
using her place for going online in private than learning
the secrets of the Delia Robbia workshop. They barely
talked.
Sam switched on her Toshiba. She used to think about the
dead girl’s fingers having touched the keys, afraid her bad
karma would rub off on her, as if it were something you
could catch like a virus; but she was over that now.
It was the website she’d come across last week while weeding
her Favourites List – a website that could only have been left
there by Sophie – which, she believed, had contaminated the
machine.
    Sam went in the bedroom to pack.
She was booked on a train to Venice, leaving Santa Maria
Novella at five forty – less than two hours from now. Having
failed to get a flight out that afternoon, she’d cancelled her
airline ticket to Boston and used the fifty per cent refund to
buy a rail pass across Europe. She hadn’t told anyone, not
even Jimmy, she’d changed her plans. It was safer that way.
She wasn’t sorry to be quitting Florence. She’d fallen in
love with the city aged nineteen on a Study Abroad
programme and ended up calling it home for nearly a decade.
But she saw herself now turning into what she despised, a
perpetual student, staying on year after year, completing one
course in fine arts, and then another, kidding herself that it
wasn’t only about Federico.
At twenty-eight, still attractive with her vellum-white skin,
sheaf of dark curly hair and blue eyes – she called it her
Jewish colleen look – Sam had days when she worried that
he had stolen her best years. She’d known too many lonely,
washed-up, middle-aged American women, who’d come for
the art and the sex and had to settle for working in bookshops
or as tour guides or teaching English at one of
Florence’s billion or so language schools. Even if her life
hadn’t been in danger, she felt she was getting out just in
time.
Sam frowned and listened.
The faint ticking came from her travel clock on the bedside
table. She folded it into its green lizard-skin case and dropped
it in her overnight bag, then sat down on the bed with a sigh.
She knew she should strip the mildly disgraceful sheets, she
just didn’t have the energy. A rumpled fold of cream silk
caught her eye. From under the pillows, she pulled out a
nightshirt that she hadn’t worn for the past couple of weeks.
In hot weather she always slept naked.
Wait a minute. The act of slipping a hand between mattress
and pillows had triggered a memory of her and Federico.
Jesus . . . wait just a goddamn minute.
She pulled back the pillows, then jumping to her feet tore
the sheets from the bed. She moved the bed out from the
wall and yanked the mattress to the floor. It was gone, no
mistake, she’d have remembered packing it – her vibe wasn’t
there.
    She thought hard, trying to recall the last time, searching
for an innocent explanation. Unless Federico . . . but the
sonofabitch had given her back his key weeks ago, the same
day he dumped her and, with a predictability that made her
ashamed for him, returned to his Florentine wife and
children.
Her stomach heaved. She ran to the bathroom and stood
over the basin until the nausea passed. Catching sight of
her reflection in the mirror, Sam saw that her eyes were
almost black. Fear had dilated her pupils till only a thin
corona of blue was left. She needed to take something . . .
she knew she still had