No Way Home Read Online Free PDF

still looked young and careless to her. She looked up at the mantelpiece at Michele’s picture, Grayson framed beside her, just as the clock on the mantel struck twelve.
    Lillie turned the page and tried to focus on the recipes, but they all began to run together, the ingredients all sounding the same. Finally she set the magazines down. She rubbed her arms absently and stood up. She wandered down the hall to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and thought about having a glass of iced tea. Then she closed the door again. Her eyes went automatically to the clock over the refrigerator. It read nearly twelve-thirty.
    “It’s nothing,” she said aloud. “It’s Founders Day.” It was a given that kids stayed out late on Founders Day. She remembered it from her own youth. She especially remembered the year she was seventeen. She and Jordan Hill had gone off and sat in the front seat of his father’s pickup truck in the clearing by the Boy Scout camp until two-thirty in the morning. They would have been there all night if the superintendent of the camp hadn’t heard his dogs barking and come out and shooed them away. Her father had hit her with his belt when she finally came home. The one and only time she could ever remember him hitting her. She didn’t know it then, but the cancer was already in him, eating away at him. He knew he was going to die, and he was frantic about her. She bit her lip at the memory. Those last few months, those last rushed attempts at love and discipline, to try to leave an impression that would last while there was still time. All parents do it, she thought. When we finally know they’re safe, we strike out at them for the worry they caused us.
    She had walked back into the living room and now she returned to the mantel. She picked up the double heart-shaped frame. On one side was a photo of Michele, on the other, Grayson. She looked from one to the other, then carefully set the frame back down.
    She sat down in Pink’s chair with her back to the door and stared at the blank TV screen. The telephone was on a table beside her.
    Lillie looked down at it now. Ring, she thought. Somebody call and tell me that everything is all right.
    It’s nothing, she reminded herself. Nothing. Any guy who broke out of jail this afternoon is long gone by now. Miles from here. And all the kids stay out late on Founders Day. Pink is probably just having a hard time rounding them up. He doesn’t know where the kids go. And when he finds them they’ll be humiliated to have their father come after them like that, herding them home. There was no reason to worry in a town like this one. This was the safest town in the world.
    She picked up the county newspaper and tried to read it, but the words didn’t make any sense. She threw it down again, stood up, and began to pace through the house. Every so often she would go to the front door and look out at the empty moonlit lawn and the quiet field beyond the street. Each time she came back and looked at the clock, it seemed that another ten or fifteen minutes had passed. She began to clench and unclench her fists as she paced, as if to mimic the beating of her cold heart.
    “Please, God,” she said aloud, “don’t scare me like this.”
    Just then she heard the crunch of gravel in the driveway and the sound of a car’s engine. Her heart lifted and she ran back to the living-room window. Then, through the gauze curtains that were closed between the open drapes, she saw a filmy blue light flashing out in front of the house and heard the faint squawk of a police radio.
    Lillie stopped dead in the middle of the floor. The blue light went out, but the crackle of the radio could still be heard as well as the slamming of car doors. Pink’s weary tread scraped the concrete slab of the front porch, and then the door opened. He looked up at her and then looked away.
    Lillie did not scream or cry out. She stared silently as Pink came in, followed by Grayson, and then, his