Riptide Read Online Free PDF Page A

Ryan, it was very private, at the end of Belladonna Drive, no prying neighbors anywhere near, and that’s what she wanted. The nearest house was a good half mile away. The property was bordered on three sides by thick maple and pine trees, and the view of the ocean from the widow’s walk was spectacular.
    She hummed when she moved in on Thursday afternoon. She even managed to work up a sweat. Even though she wouldn’t use them, she cleaned the bedrooms just because she wanted to. She wallowed in all the space. She never wanted to live in an apartment again.
    She’d bought a gun from a guy she met in a restaurant in Rockland, Maine. She’d taken a big chance, but it had, thank God, worked out. The gun was a beauty—a Coonan.357 Magnum automatic, and the guy had taken her just next door, where there was a sports shop with an indoor range, and taught her how to shoot. He’d then asked her to go to a motel with him. He was child’s play to deal with after the maniac in New York. All she’d had to do was say no very firmly. No need to draw her new gun on the guy.
    She gently laid the Coonan in the top drawer of her bedside table, a very old mahogany piece with rusted hinges. As she closed the drawer she realized that she hadn’t cried when her mother died. She hadn’t cried at her funeral. But now, as she gently placed a photograph of her mother on top of the bedside table, she felt the tears roll down her cheeks. She stood there staring down at her mother’s picture, taken nearly twenty years before, showing a beautiful young woman, so fair and fine-boned, laughing, hugging Becca against her side. Becca couldn’t remember where they were, maybe in upstate New York. They’d stayed up there for a while when Becca was six and seven years old. “Oh, Mom, I’m so sorry. If only you hadn’t locked your heart away with a dead man, maybe there could have been another man to love, couldn’t there? You had so much to offer, so much love to give. Oh God, I miss you so much.”
    She lay down on the bed, held a pillow against her chest, and cried until there were no more tears. She got up and wiped the light sheen of dust off the photo, then carefully set it down again. “I’m safe now, Mom. I don’t know what’s going on, but at least I’m safe for the time being. That man won’t find me here. How could he? I know no one followed me.”
    She realized, as she was speaking to her mother’s photo, that she also ached for the father she’d never known, Thomas Matlock, shot and killed in Vietnam so long ago, when she was just a baby. A war hero. But her mother hadn’t forgotten, ever. And it was his name that her mother had whispered before she’d fallen into the drug-induced coma. “Thomas, Thomas.”
    He’d been dead for over twenty-five years. So long ago. A different world, but the people were the same—bothgood and evil, as always—mauling one another to get the lion’s share of the spoils. He’d seen her before he’d gone, her mother had told her, seen her and hugged her and loved her. But Becca couldn’t remember him.
    She finished hanging up her clothes and arranging her toiletries in the old-fashioned bathroom with its claw-footed bathtub. The teenagers had even scrubbed between the claws. Good job.
    There was a knock on the door. Becca dropped the towel she was holding and froze.
    Another knock.
    It wasn’t him. He had no idea where she was. There was no way he could find her. It was probably the guy to check the one air-conditioning unit in the living room window. Or the garbage man, or—
    â€œDon’t be paranoid,” she said aloud to the blue towel as she picked it up and hung it on the very old wooden bar. “Do you also realize you’ve been talking out loud a whole lot recently? Another thing, you don’t sound particularly bright.” But who cared if she