Sand Witches in the Hamptons (9781101597385) Read Online Free PDF

should have jumped on the bus to the Hamptons and brought him chicken soup, if they sold it at the deli in town.
    Desert fever didn’t fit my symptoms so well. A bacteria from mold, it caused lung infections, not bloody noses and rashes. Most references were to miners in California and the American West, though I suppose it could exist in any desert, infecting the soldiers fighting there, but not with a flu-like bug.
    They’d think I was crazy if I went to the doc-in-a-box at the big drugstore on Third Avenue. I’ve never been wandering in a desert, and I didn’t have any of the chest pains, swelling in extremities, or coughing the references described.
    And the police would think I was crazy if I went to them with my problems with Deni. Another email from Denidenis lurked in my inbox. Open it or not? How could I know if she apologized or threatened me if I didn’t read it? I watched the new mail list like an idiot, the way you’d watch a grizzly, wondering what the bear would do next and if you could outrun it. The list looked just as lethal, harboring malice at the drop of a mouse button. Open it to check for hate mail? Ignore it and hope Deni found another hobby, another victim?
    You could not outrun a grizzly bear.
    Curiosity won over dread. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Now I couldn’t convince myself Deni was just some maladjusted kid I’d disillusioned. She was a frigging sociopath. The email was another cartoon, a collage of my characters from four of my books, scanned or traced, copied, then photoshopped so their heads rolled at their feet. The message read: Y OU ARE NEXT, B ITCH.
    No UR NXT, which I would have expected, as if Deni were a different person now, as if disappointment and rage made her more mature, more careful, studied almost, in her furious communications. Maybe I was prejudiced, but I felt a person who could spell posed more danger than some slapdash, corner-cutting, hasty tweeter.
    Not wanting to touch it, but knowing I had to, I printed out a copy, and one of Deni’s previous menacing email messages. Then I called my friend Van on his cell and left a callback number for him.
    Officer Donovan Gregory had interviewed me when the troll came to town, although he had no idea of Fafhrd’s existence, only the chaos the trespasser from Unity caused. Van and I became friends. We had dinner once and spent a day together when he came out to Montauk with some cop buddies and their families. Maybe more could have come from it, but then Grant came on the scene, the British agent from DUE that I almost got engaged to. Van disappeared from the case and from my thoughts, but I knew he’d still give me advice.
    He sounded glad to hear from me when he called back ten minutes later. Until I explained the situation.
    â€œWhat are you, a lodestone for trouble?”
    â€œThis one wasn’t my fault.”
    â€œThat’s what they all say. Funny how all that trouble with the runaway truck we never found on your block and the broken toilets at the hospital where you took your cousin and the fallen crane across from the publisher’s office you visited all stopped when you left town for the Hamptons.”
    When the troll followed me to continue his mayhem there. “Yeah, but this is a kid, and my books.”
    He told me to forward the emails, so I did and waited. I heard him whistle when he saw the hacked-off heads. “Nasty stuff.”
    â€œAnd my drawings got ruined, too.”
    I thought I heard a smile when he said, “That’s the least of our worries.”
    I liked the “our.” Van was on my side.
    â€œThe problem is,” he continued, “there’s not enough to charge anyone, even if we could find the sender. You say you don’t know her name?”
    â€œShe uses a screen name, which could be fake altogether. And her phone number shows up as unknown.”
    â€œA throwaway cell phone. You can get one anywhere. We can trace