Nail Biter Read Online Free PDF Page B

strange group. But then I spotted something moving inside the gently curved fingers of Wanda's hand. Something alive, small and furry, like . . . a mouse?
    No. It was a bat. A small, brown, wickedly bright-eyed little bat with its wings folded up tight, so it resembled at first an ordinary household rodent.
    “Um, Wanda?”
    Bats carried rabies. “Honey, aren't you worried that bat's going to get startled or something, and bite you?”
    Wanda's face lit up.
Silly woman,
her look said, but not in an unpleasant way.
It won't hurt me
. Tenderly she tucked the tiny creature into the pocket on her sleeve, from which refuge its eyes went on staring unblinkingly, shiny black and expressionless.
    I broke from its gaze at last, unsure why the girl and her unusual pet had captured me so thoroughly. “Come on, Jenna. I can't fix electrical things until the power goes back on, and the pump's on the power, so I guess that means I can't do much with the leaky faucet either.”
    Ellie and I had left flashlights here, and once Jenna had produced them we went together toward the back of the house, where the howling seemed loudest.
    “But I'll get rid of the noise, if I can,” I said. Probably the broken window or whatever it was just needed a rag stuffed in it to stop the sound.
    “Ow-wow-wow!”
Howling when the wind blew and fading when it subsided, the noise seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. But at last we followed the flashlight beams out to the small attached utility shed, where we hit pay dirt. The volume jumped as soon as I opened the door.
    Jenna waved her flash around. Its beam reflected off the windows and picked out the shapes of a lot of useless, unrelated junk. The area had become a catchall for the things Ellie and I had found too heavy to remove by ourselves, or that we couldn't find other places for: an old wringer-style washing machine; big rusty pieces of weight-lifting equipment; an ancient, massive automobile engine nailed into a wooden crate.
    The air was sharp with the smell of old potting soil spilled on the brick floor, mingled with the faint sweet scent of motor oil. In a corner lay a heap of ice-fishing equipment including an ice strainer and an auger, which was the tool you used to drill down through the ice to where the fish were.
    If you liked going ice fishing at all; I'd been meaning to take that bit of gear home for Wade, who actually did. But now as the autumn storm hurled itself darkly against the windows, I figured I had time; with luck, it wouldn't be ice-fishing season for another few weeks.
    “There,” uttered Jenna, aiming her flashlight at the base of the wall where a puddle reflected the beam.
    Drat, it meant water was coming in somewhere above. But that was odd. Ellie and I had worked in the house through a couple of August storms, removing what old stuff we could. And although the shed was ramshackle we hadn't discovered any sizable leaks then.
    Maybe one of the tenants had shifted some of the junk out here, I thought as I stepped carefully between the washer and the auto engine. The window frames were warped, and if you bumped one of them its sash might move enough to . . .
    I reached down, touching the wet spot, then yanked my hand back with a visceral little shudder.
Uh-oh.
    “What?” Jenna asked. “You okay?”
    “I'm fine. Go back with the others, all right?”
    But something in my tone alerted her; at once she was right beside me.
    “What is it? You don't sound so good . . . Oh.”
    Because the puddle wasn't water. It was blood, its surface sticky and darkly gelatinous.
    Ow-ooh!
the wind howled unhappily.
    Also there was a pair of leather boots lying near the puddle, and unless I was mistaken the boots were being worn by someone.
    A dead someone.
     
Chapter 3
     
    My name is Jacobia Tiptree and when I first came to Maine I thought “old paint” was a nickname for somebody's favorite horse. But then I bought a massive old rambling fixer-upper of a house with a lot of old