In the Waning Light Read Online Free PDF

fucked up in her head and unable to allow anyone to love her. Refusing to need—truly need—anyone again.
    But the door remained shut.
    He didn’t come.
    And she knew, this time he wouldn’t. This time, it really was over.

CHAPTER 2
    Three days later. Oregon coast.
    Meg peered through the wipers slashing arcs across her truck’s windshield. Rain slanted silver in her headlights. The road was lonely, dark, a sepulchral mist sifting through trees. Strangler vines snaked around coastal pines, cutting off lifeblood, creeping over everything, as if at war with Himalayan blackberry—the place being slowly consumed by alien invasive species and populous sprawl.
    The signs had flashed by in the night. GEARHART . SEASIDE , CANNON BEACH , MANZANITA . . .
    Tension tightened her stomach.
    Are you happy?
    Jonah had asked this question in the fall, during a visit to the pumpkin patch, as they’d chased his two nieces through the corn maze. He’d grasped her hand, swung her around to face him, kissed her full on the mouth in the rustling privacy of the corn walls. Eyes bright. Hands cold.
    “Of course I’m happy,” she’d told him.
    Why wouldn’t she be? She had literary acclaim, financial success. Her health. Strength. She was busting with career energy. She’d snagged the man the Seattle Times had dubbed the most eligible bachelor in the Northwest. A man with the looks of a dark and broody Heathcliff on high misty moors. A man who was ridiculously independently wealthy in his own right, and who, without question, loved her deeply.
    Or had.
    She’d met him over three years ago while interviewing him for one of her books. He’d been the consultant for the police on the case, and had presented evidence in court on the state of mind of a serial sexual sadist.
    But if anything, her Jonah was an acute observer of human nature, a perpetual delver into the psyche. An obsessive watcher, and he’d been watching her that chill October day. He’d seen in her eyes something deeper, a shadow, as she’d chased his nieces through the husks of corn. They were sisters with the same four-year gap between them as Sherry and herself—the older one remarkably beautiful and full of grace. The younger one gawkish and tomboyish and slavishly loyal to her sibling. An awkward little shadow.
    Sherry’s shadow, they’d once dubbed Meg. The redheaded little hoyden who’d chased continually in the wake of Sherry’s golden light. The kid sister who’d idolized Sherry’s feminine magic, the way her big sister could smile with the apparent naiveté of a child while simultaneously wrapping people around her little finger.
    “Come. Let’s find the girls!” Meg had pulled away, the husky corn walls suddenly too close, a prison labyrinth she needed to escape.
    But Jonah had held on a moment longer. “What do you want out of life—children?”
    “When we’re ready.” She’d left him alone in the maze. She’d run after the girls, chasing perhaps a memory through the dead growth, chasing something in herself, or perhaps, as Jonah would have said, running again. From allowing him—anyone—in.
    Hot irritation flushed through her, and her hands tightened around the wheel of her Ford F-350. On the back of irritation rode self-reproach, a kind of shame. She reached over to the passenger seat, jabbed the record button of her digital recorder, and took a breath. The beginning, just start at the beginning . . .
    “I should never have lied for Sherry that day,” she said softly into the mic of her hands-free headset, peering into darkness, headlights cutting narrow tunnels into mist. She passed a brooding monkey puzzle tree choked with ivy. “Should never have covered for her—” A sign caught her headlights, white paint bouncing back the gleam of her beams. SHELTER BAY . FIVE MILES .
    Something ran across the road. She hit the brakes, skidded to a stop on the gravel shoulder. Her heart thudded. All around her camper and truck, bushes waved