Nail Biter Read Online Free PDF Page A

stepped out to inhale some sanity-restoring breaths of fresh air while gazing at my own house.
    It was a massive 180-year-old white clapboard Federal with three full floors plus an attic, forty-eight old double-hung windows flanked by dark green wooden shutters, and a rotten front porch. In fact, that porch was so decrepit I feared that on Halloween night some trick-or-treater might crash through it under the added weight of even a single Snickers bar.
    So over the past few days I'd been demolishing it board by board with a crowbar and sledgehammer, preparatory to building a new one. And after glancing again at the sky I decided that before I left I'd better put the tools indoors, just in case the weather did decide to throw me a curve.
    But then the truck with the lumber for the new porch pulled up; I had forgotten it was coming. The lumber had to be stacked so it wouldn't warp and then covered with a tarp, and that meant a trip to the hardware store. Also the tarp needed to be weighted down with bricks, and I knew I had some, so I scavenged dutifully around the yard for . . . well, you get the idea.
    Thus it wasn't until four in the afternoon that I'd left a brief note on the kitchen table, got Wade's pickup truck started and muscled it out of the driveway, and headed for the rental house.
    And now I wished I hadn't. Wet leaves plastered themselves to the windshield like dark flattened hands and were swept aside; headlights glared smearily yellow through the rain, then vanished behind me.
    As I reached the Long Cove Road turnoff, a tractor-trailer came barreling out of the rain, its massive tires spinning silvery gouts that blinded me for a long moment while the pickup shuddered in the bigger vehicle's backwash.
    But I made it through the turn and a few grateful moments later pulled up in front of the rental property. The tenants' white van was in the driveway, so I backed the truck onto the lawn and dashed for the front steps.
    From behind me as I knocked and then struggled as usual with the sticky door knob, one of many in the house that needed repair—
screwdriver, chisel, new can of 3-In-One oil,
I recited mentally—waves crashed wildly onto the shore of what was ordinarily a quiet cove just across the road.
    Suddenly the door jerked inward, yanking me along with it.
    “Goodness!” exclaimed Marge Cathcart. She backed away hastily as I stumbled inside.
    It was the kind of remark Marge tended to make. At fifty or so, she was plump, plain, and motherly-appearing, with washed-out blue eyes, soft blurry features, and a habit of wearing a cotton housedress with a droopy cardigan and fuzzy blue slippers.
    In reply I made the kind of remarks I tended to make, none of them having to do with goodness. Marge supposedly had some old family connections in Eastport, and this ordinarily would've made me more careful about how I spoke in front of her; after all, who knew who her cousins might turn out to be?
    But at the moment I was soaking wet, worried about the drive home, and thoroughly annoyed, mostly at myself for coming out here at all in the middle of what was turning out to be a major weather event.
    And as if all that weren't bad enough, while I was standing there scandalizing Marge with the number of naughty words I knew, a huge crash sounded somewhere nearby and the lights went out.
    “Oh, dear,” Marge said into the darkness.
    Yeah, no kidding. Eastport has its own local generator for emergencies, but that crash had sounded irresistibly like a tree going over, probably taking down a power line along with it. Then while I stood there cursing and dripping, a pale greenish glow began brightening eerily in the living room, to the right of the entrance.
    As the hairs on my neck rose it occurred to me that I was (a) alone, (b) at the height of a raging storm, and (c) in a house occupied by a bunch of self-proclaimed witches, with no way to call for help because (d) by now the phones were almost certainly out, too.
    Then