Right Hand of Evil Read Online Free PDF

there until three in the morning. And given Ted's condition… "How bad is she?" Janet asked. The last time she'd talked to the people at the Willows, Cora had been in a semicomatose state, and her condition hadn't changed in several months.
    "I'm afraid it's not good," Lucille Mathers replied. Very quickly she added, "I don't think she can last more than another day." A pause. Then: "She wants to see your husband. If it's at all possible-"
    "Tomorrow," Janet said, making an instant decision.
    "We'll leave early in the morning, and we should be there by eleven. Can you tell her that?"
    "Of course," Lucille Mathers replied. "We'll look for you in the morning, then."
    Hanging up the phone, Janet told Ted about Cora's request. As she talked she wasn't sure he was even listening, but when he spoke, his tongue thickened with the liquor he'd consumed, she knew he had.
    And she knew it was the alcohol that was replying to her, not her husband. At least she hoped it was.
    "Why the hell should I go see Aunt Cora?" he demanded. "She's crazy as a loon, and always has been. What am I supposed to do about her?"
    "For God's sake, Ted!" Janet snapped. "She's dying, and you're the only family she's got!"
    "So?" Ted replied. "What's she ever done for me?" Then, before Janet could answer him, his head dropped down onto the sofa and his eyes closed.
    Janet was tempted to leave him exactly as he was and go to bed, but remembering that Jared and Kim hadn't come home yet, she changed her mind. Let them at least think he'd been sober enough when he came home to get himself into bed, she decided.
    Shaking him hard, she finally got him to wake up just enough to let her guide him into the bedroom. A second later he was unconscious again, sprawled out on the bed in his clothing, snoring loudly.
    No more,
Janet thought as she lay beside him an hour later. Though Jared and Kim had come in and gone to bed and, undoubtedly, right to sleep, she herself was still wide-awake, listening to Ted's heavy breathing.
    Something was going to have to change.
    She couldn't live this way any longer.
    None of them could.

CHAPTER 4
    Jared and Kimberley didn't have to glance at each other over Molly's head to understand that both of them were thinking exactly the same thing:
How come we've never been here before?
    The long drive southeast from Shreveport had been made in silence, the kind of silence that strained everyone's nerves, as if a bomb were ticking somewhere in the car, and each of them was nervously waiting for it to explode. Both the older children had held their breath when their mother offered to drive so their father could sleep, but Ted contented himself with a deep scowl in his wife's direction, and the observation that "I drive better dead drunk than most people do stone sober."
    Silence. No one was going to fall into
that
trap. Even Molly had somehow sensed that today was not a good one for fussing.
    But now, as they drove into the town of St. Albans, the tension in the car finally began to ease, partly out of the simple knowledge that the long drive through the humid heat was almost over, but mostly because the scene unfolding before them was so completely unexpected, at least for Jared and Kimberley. Although neither of them had ever been there, they had both been aware of St. Albans for as long as they could remember.
    It was where Aunt Cora lived, locked away in a sanatorium. Even when the twins were very small they'd imagined what it must look like. They'd whispered descriptions of it to each other in the bedroom they shared until they were five, vying with each other to describe the scariest place imaginable: a brick building with bars over the windows, surrounded by a high chain-link fence. "With barbwire on top," Jared solemnly assured his sister, "so the crazy people can't climb over and kill us all."
    "I bet they keep them in cages," Kim had offered, but Jared, ten minutes older, and thus far wiser than his sister, shook his head.
    "They keep