Riptide Read Online Free PDF
Author: Michael Prescott
strong as the original, so it had failed when the rest of the cellar had held up.
She counted six skulls. There might be more. She couldn’t be certain. The bones were disarticulated, disarranged. A spoils heap.
The bones were mottled in mold. Some had crumbled into whitish gray powder. They were old. Decades old.
She didn’t know if her great-grandfather was the original owner of the house. But if he was…
Then someone in her family had done this.
five
As a child, Jennifer occasionally had the sense that her life was a movie and she was watching it. She had the same feeling now, as she climbed out of the cellar—a strange conviction of unreality. She lowered the trapdoor and knelt there, running her palm over the smooth wood, simply to feel something firm and solid.
It was hard to keep her thoughts clear. There were bodies in her cellar. She had to do something about that. There must be some action she could take.…
But first she had to check on Richard.
She called his number, letting the phone ring for over a minute. No answer.
He had to be home. He never went anywhere. He hated walking the streets, and he had neither a driver’s license nor a car. She saw to it that food and other essentials were delivered to his door.
She called twice more with the same result, then tried the building manager. Brusquely he assured her that everything was fine. “The place didn’t fall down, okay? It wasn’t that that big of a quake. Now if you don’t mind, I need to get back to work, okay? And hey, your crazy brother’s late on his rent again. It’s due on the first of the month, every month. Okay?”
Click.
That wasn’t good enough. She needed to know why Richard wasn’t answering his phone.
She dug her keys out of her pants pocket—she never carried a purse, too much of an encumbrance—and left the house through the kitchen door, entering the garage, a 1940s add-on. Raising the garage door, she scanned the street for signs of damage.
The day was bright and cool, the morning fog long gone. Seagulls flocked around an overturned curbside trash can. A For Sale sign stood on the sandy front yard of Mr. Beschel’s house down the street; the owner himself had already moved to an island off the Washington coast. Taggers’ marks and gang intaglios defaced tree trunks and utility poles.
There were no downed utility lines, no fires. Her street had come through unscathed. She heard the Rottweiler howling, disturbed by the event. She hoped the little boy and his mother weren’t too badly shaken up.
Her Toyota Prius was undamaged. She drove north, her radio tuned to KFWB. The newscasters were saying that the quake’s epicenter was in Culver City, on the western end of the Puente Hills Fault. Another segment of the same fault line had ruptured in 1987, damaging ten thousand structures citywide and causing eight fatalities. Today’s event was much smaller. So far there were no reported deaths.
Two blocks north of her address, a crowd of people were holding an impromptu barbecue, using up whatever meat and poultry they had on hand because their power was out. That was the thing about earthquakes—the damage was always scattershot, hopscotching from street to street.
Driving through Venice, she saw additional signs of hard shaking. Though the epicenter was several miles to the east, the coastal areas were particularly vulnerable to seismic waves. The tremors could literally churn the sandy soil into quicksand. Venice, built on swampland, faced the most serious hazard.
She passed the splintered remnants of someone’s deck, which had plunged onto the patio below. Farther down the block, a front gate had been wrenched askew, while across the street a palm tree had canted into the side wall of a two-story Mediterranean home.
All around her there was the same uncanny quiet she remembered from the aftermath of other quakes. Birds did not sing. There was an eerie calm, surreal as the stillness in
She counted six skulls. There might be more. She couldn’t be certain. The bones were disarticulated, disarranged. A spoils heap.
The bones were mottled in mold. Some had crumbled into whitish gray powder. They were old. Decades old.
She didn’t know if her great-grandfather was the original owner of the house. But if he was…
Then someone in her family had done this.
five
As a child, Jennifer occasionally had the sense that her life was a movie and she was watching it. She had the same feeling now, as she climbed out of the cellar—a strange conviction of unreality. She lowered the trapdoor and knelt there, running her palm over the smooth wood, simply to feel something firm and solid.
It was hard to keep her thoughts clear. There were bodies in her cellar. She had to do something about that. There must be some action she could take.…
But first she had to check on Richard.
She called his number, letting the phone ring for over a minute. No answer.
He had to be home. He never went anywhere. He hated walking the streets, and he had neither a driver’s license nor a car. She saw to it that food and other essentials were delivered to his door.
She called twice more with the same result, then tried the building manager. Brusquely he assured her that everything was fine. “The place didn’t fall down, okay? It wasn’t that that big of a quake. Now if you don’t mind, I need to get back to work, okay? And hey, your crazy brother’s late on his rent again. It’s due on the first of the month, every month. Okay?”
Click.
That wasn’t good enough. She needed to know why Richard wasn’t answering his phone.
She dug her keys out of her pants pocket—she never carried a purse, too much of an encumbrance—and left the house through the kitchen door, entering the garage, a 1940s add-on. Raising the garage door, she scanned the street for signs of damage.
The day was bright and cool, the morning fog long gone. Seagulls flocked around an overturned curbside trash can. A For Sale sign stood on the sandy front yard of Mr. Beschel’s house down the street; the owner himself had already moved to an island off the Washington coast. Taggers’ marks and gang intaglios defaced tree trunks and utility poles.
There were no downed utility lines, no fires. Her street had come through unscathed. She heard the Rottweiler howling, disturbed by the event. She hoped the little boy and his mother weren’t too badly shaken up.
Her Toyota Prius was undamaged. She drove north, her radio tuned to KFWB. The newscasters were saying that the quake’s epicenter was in Culver City, on the western end of the Puente Hills Fault. Another segment of the same fault line had ruptured in 1987, damaging ten thousand structures citywide and causing eight fatalities. Today’s event was much smaller. So far there were no reported deaths.
Two blocks north of her address, a crowd of people were holding an impromptu barbecue, using up whatever meat and poultry they had on hand because their power was out. That was the thing about earthquakes—the damage was always scattershot, hopscotching from street to street.
Driving through Venice, she saw additional signs of hard shaking. Though the epicenter was several miles to the east, the coastal areas were particularly vulnerable to seismic waves. The tremors could literally churn the sandy soil into quicksand. Venice, built on swampland, faced the most serious hazard.
She passed the splintered remnants of someone’s deck, which had plunged onto the patio below. Farther down the block, a front gate had been wrenched askew, while across the street a palm tree had canted into the side wall of a two-story Mediterranean home.
All around her there was the same uncanny quiet she remembered from the aftermath of other quakes. Birds did not sing. There was an eerie calm, surreal as the stillness in
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