In the Dark Read Online Free PDF Page A

     
Are you going to be alone tonight, whore?
     
     
 
     
There were photographs, too. Whoever had done this had cut them out of porno magazines. I saw black-and-white shots of men with huge penises and women servicing them with their mouths. More messages were scrawled on the photos.
     
     
 
     
        You’ll suck mine, too.
     
        Is your ass still a virgin?
     
 
     
     
“Are you crazy?” I nearly screamed at her. “You have to go to the police with this.”
     
“I don’t want to make things worse. School will be done soon, and he’ll stop.”
     
“You don’t know that.”
     
“Come on, he hasn’t done anything. He’s just trying to creep me out. He’s like some peeping tom trying to get under my skin. Well, I won’t let him.”
     
“Do you have any idea who’s doing this?” I asked again.
     
“No. I talked to a few guys, you know, to see if they’d heard anything. I thought maybe he’d be bragging about it to his buddies. But nobody knew who it was, or if they did, they wouldn’t tell me.”
     
“Did you tell Dad?”
     
“Are you kidding? He’d flip. And don’t you dare breathe a word, little sister. Somehow it would wind up as my fault.”
     
While I watched, Laura began tearing up all of the notes and photographs. I wanted to stop her. I told her I thought she was making a big mistake, but Laura shredded and ripped and tore until she had a small mountain of remnants that she slid off her bed into the garbage.
     
“So much for that,” she said.
     
     
     
 
     
 
     
 
     
 
     
     
    3
___________
     
     
 
     
     
 
     
     
 
     
     
 
     
     
 
     
 
     
Stride and Tish left Grandma’s Saloon together. Tish lit a cigarette when they were alone on the concrete pier that jutted out into Lake Superior. Her muscles unwound. She tilted her chin and exhaled a stream of smoke like a sigh. The breeze caught and dispersed it, but Stride could taste the ghost of smoke in the air, and he had to jam his hands in his pockets to beat down the craving.
     
She leaned against the wall bordering the canal. Stride was next to her. The deep, narrow channel led from the lake to the inner harbors of Duluth and Superior. A century-old lift bridge, resplendent in gray steel, rose and fell over the canal when the boats came. On the opposite side of the bridge was the area known as the Point, a tiny finger of land jutting out like a natural shelter for the harbor. Stride and Serena lived there, in a lakeside cottage that dated back to the 1890s. The city side of the bridge was known as Canal Park, and it had become a haven for restaurants and hotels in the last twenty years. Tourists came to Canal Park to watch the big boats because it was like seeing living dinosaurs from the city’s past. Once upon a time, Duluth had been an industrial boomtown, whose economy was linked to the fate of hundreds of great boats carrying iron ore.The downtown area was filled with Victorian-style mansions that were reminders of a time when the city was rich from mining and shipping. Not anymore.
     
“I can’t believe how this area has changed,” Tish said. “When I was a kid, there was nothing but old factory buildings down here. Now it’s like Coney Island.”
     
“Yeah, there’s a lot of money in Canal Park, but it doesn’t trickle down,” Stride told her. “They’re building condos to lure people up from Minneapolis, but the city is struggling. Like always.”
     
“You live out on the Point?” Tish asked.
     
Stride nodded.
     
“Nobody lived out there in the old days. The Point was where kids went to smoke dope and have sex on the beach.”
     
Stride laughed. “It still is.”
     
Tish zipped up her leather jacket. The early evening breeze off the lake was cool. “I forgot that the summers aren’t hot here.”
     
“We’re counting on global warming,” Stride said. “In a few years, we’ll be the new Florida.”
     
“You sound cynical.”
     
“You can’t live your whole life in Duluth and not be a little