Last Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

even though she didn’t know them by name. They’d lived in the neighborhood for six years now, but she had yet to meet more than a few of her closest neighbors.
    Beth and Logan trailed behind her, their hair wet with sweat and their cheeks mottled red. Jeff hurried ahead, refusing to be encumbered by his embarrassingly out-of-shape family.
    When they finally reached the entrance to Oak Hollow, she looked up the street to their house—fifth from the entrance—and saw that Jeff already waited in the driveway. She wondered why he hadn’t gone inside.
    “Mom, do you have a key?” he called as she approached. “The code doesn’t work.”
    Her heart sank. “Oh, no. I didn’t even think of that.” It was her bright idea to set the burglar system with an outside code for opening the garage door. That way the kids would never have a key to lose—all they had to do was punch in the code to get in. The door that led into the house from the garage was unlocked at all times. It had worked out perfectly.
    Until now.
    She hadn’t carried a key in years, so had no means of getting in. She trudged up the driveway. “Can we pull it up?”
    “No way. If you could do that, any doofus out there could break into our house.”
    “But there must be some way.”
    “There is,” Jeff said. “It’s called a key. You remember what a key is, don’t you, Mom? It’s one of those things that you were always afraid I’d drop into the hands of a serial killer? Like Logan and Beth haven’t given the code out to all their friends.”
    Kay decided not to bite. Jeff had a habit of picking fights with her when he was tired, hungry, and hot, but she had more important things to do than worry about who had their code. As soon as this crisis passed, she’d ream her kids, change the code, and threaten their lives if they ever so much as uttered it again.
    “Don’t tell me we can’t get in!” Beth came up the steep driveway and threw herself down on the grass. “It’s a thousand degrees out here! I want to go in and get cool.”
    “It’s not cool in there, Bozo,” Jeff said. “The air conditioner is out, too.”
    Logan didn’t have the energy to join in the banter. He just went to the hose on the side of the house and turned on the water. A small stream trickled out. He took a drink, then turned back to Kay. “Is the water going out, too? I turned it on full blast.”
    Kay grabbed the hose and tried the faucet again. He was right—full blast, but only a trickle. She twisted it off to save what was in the pipes. “Okay, nobody else use any water until we get in. Everybody spread out and check the windows to see if one’s unlocked.”
    The kids did as they were told for once, and Kay prayed there would be one open, in spite of the fact that she rarely opened windows for fear of letting out the valuable air-conditioning. There was also the security issue. Two houses in the neighborhood had been broken into in the last three weeks. Both times, the burglar had gone in through an open window. She hadn’t allowed anyone to unlock their windows since.
    She heard Jeff yelling from the backyard and ran around the house.
    “My window’s open!” he shouted.
    She looked up to the second-floor window and saw that it was open about six inches. “Thank goodness. Now if we could just get up there.”
    “I can do it,” Jeff said. “All I have to do is climb the lattice on the side of the house where the roof is a little lower, then I can walk up onto the steeper roof and slide down to the landing below my window.”
    Kay just stared at him. “You sound like you’ve done this before.”
    He grinned. “Nah. Just thought about it. You know, when I was grounded and stuff.”
    She didn’t have time to deal with this, so she put it on her growing list of things to discuss later. “All right. Do it.”
    They went around to the lattice, and she watched him climb it deftly, as if he’d had plenty of practice. No wonder a couple of the slats