Mansions Of The Dead Read Online Free PDF

there was a strange heaviness in the air. Sweeney had pulled her car around and parked illegally in the lot behind the museum where she had her office, leaving the engine running and the hazards blinking madly to scare away the campus cops. She was carrying a box of books, as well as the backpack for her laptop and teaching materials, and she had put a foot up on the car and balanced the box on her knee so she could open the driver’s side door of her ancient Rabbit. But she must have had slushy snow on the bottom of her shoe because she slipped, sending the box of books tumbling into a snowbank. At that moment, the elastic band holding her hair back broke, shooting off into a puddle in the parking lot, and as she had bent to retrieve the now sodden books, she’d slipped on a patch of ice and fallen. Her nearly six-foot frame did not topple easily and she banged her knee on the sidewalk as she fell.
    “Um . . . do you need any help, Sweeney?” She had felt him standing there on the sidewalk and had looked up to find Brad trying not to smile.
    There had been nothing for it but to burst out laughing. He hadlaughed too and helped her pick up the books, put them back in the box, and load it into the back of the Rabbit.
    “Do you want a ride somewhere?” she’d asked, after thanking him for his help.
    “I don’t have far to go,” he’d said. “I can walk.”
    “No. Get in. It looks like it’s going to rain.”
    Well mannered, he had accepted gracefully and slid into the passenger seat, looking around at her messy car as though it were an interesting museum exhibit.
    “Don’t tell me you have a really neat car,” she’d said.
    “Yeah, I’m a little anal actually. But I respect people who are messy. It probably means you’re creative. Something like that.” He’d grinned and she remembered being surprised at how natural he was with her.
    They had been almost to his apartment—on Harvard Street, he’d told her—when Sweeney had remembered she’d been planning to go back and pick up a second box of books from her office. In the confusion of her fall, and then running into Brad, she’d completely forgotten that she’d left her office door open, the box of books still on the floor. “Shit.” She slammed her hand against the steering wheel.
    What?” He’d looked startled.
    “I was going to get another box of books. I left my office door open and I just completely forgot. That’s all right. I’ll drop you off and then go back for them.”
    “But if you drop me, it’s one way, and you’ll have to go all the way around again. If you take a right up here you can just swing back to the museum and I can help you carry the box out,” he’d said sensibly.
    “You sure? You don’t have to be anywhere?”
    “Nope.”
    The skies had opened just as she’d pulled up in the lot again, and they’d run cursing from the car to the back door of the museum, then stood for a minute in the stairwell to the upper-floor offices.
    “I’m so sorry,” Sweeney said. “Jeez, we’re soaked.”
    Upstairs she had found everyone gone and her office door still open. She looked out the window and saw that the rain was comingdown in planes, violently pounding the pavement. “I think we should just wait a minute, see if it slows down. I don’t want these books to get wet too. Oh God, I’m soaked. And you’re leaking.” He was standing in the hallway and a puddle was forming beneath him. “Here, you want a cup of coffee or something? I have an electric kettle and a French press in my file cabinet, the sign of a true addict.”
    “I thought professors were supposed to have bottles of bourbon in their file cabinets.”
    “Well, I’ve got one of those too, but I think the administration might frown on me offering it to you.”
    She’d made coffee and they had sat on the floor of her office, so they wouldn’t drip on the chairs, and talked about the class.
    “You did a really good job on those samplers,” she’d