Stranger With My Face Read Online Free PDF Page A

have seen you. You’re right about that. It must have been yesterday.”
    “Neal said you told him—”
    “I was mistaken, I guess. Had my mind on the new book. You know how I am sometimes.” He went over to the refrigerator and
     opened the door and got out a bottle of white wine.
    “While you’re in there, could you get out the hamburger?” Mom asked. “What I was complaining about was your standing here
     this morning, watching your eggs cook, when you could have been rinsing dishes.”
    “I wasn’t awake enough to think about that,” Dad said.
    He poured the wine into two glasses, and he and Mom sat down together at the kitchen table to talk about the events of the
     day, which was something that always bewildered me, because neither of them had been anywhere or seen anybody. I left them
     there and went back up to the living room. Neal was still drawing. He had completed the front view of his castle and was working
     on a picture of it from another angle.
    “I’m putting a dinosaur in the moat,” he told me without looking up.
    “That’s a good idea.”
    I sat down in a chair by the picture window overlooking the sea. Directly below me the water frothed white around the base
     of the rocks. A gull came circling in so close that its wing brushed against the glass, leaving a gray feather pinned there
     momentarily by the wind before a shift in air currents allowed it to slip away.
    I was scared.
    Someone had entered my life, and I didn’t know who. The conclusion I had come to earlier that afternoon after talking with
     Jeff now had to be discarded. The fact that my father, too, had seen a girl like me—in a place I had not been—was too much
     to be coincidence. Cliff House was not kept locked during the day. It was possible that someone could have entered. The girl
     who had been on the beach the night before might have ascended the stairs, moving in and out of my father’s sight as he stood,
     lost in his thoughts, planning the scene he was preparing to put on paper.
    It could have happened. But— why ?
    If there was such a person—a Laurie Stratton look-alike—what was she doing here on Brighton Island now that most of the summer
     people were gone? Why had she come here? When had she discovered her resemblance to me? What did she want from me and from
     the people whose lives were a part of mine? Nothing had been removed from my room, I was certain of that. My possessions did
     not appear to have been tampered with. It seemed almost as if this person had come visiting out of idle curiosity, to see
     where and how I lived.
    Neal continued to draw. I sat in silence, struggling with questions that had no answers, while the sun sank lower and lower
     in the sky and the clouds began to soften and turn pink. After a while Meg came home. Her chirping voice came up the stairwell,
     describing the exciting first-day-in-third-grade events to the audience in the kitchen. Then Mom called Neal and me to the
     table, and we sat down to hamburgers and beans and what would have been a salad if Mom had gone down to the grocery store
     in the village, but was instead lettuce with some chopped onion sprinkled over it.
    “I lost track of time,” she explained, not really apologetically. “One minute it was morning, and the next time I looked the
     day was almost over.”
    After dinner my family played Monopoly at a card table in the living room. Any other evening I probably would have played
     with them, but tonight I was too upset to be able to concentrate. I needed to be alone to think, but I didn’t want to go to
     my bedroom.
    Megan was in the process of purchasing Boardwalk when I went down the stairs and let myself out the kitchen door into the
     night.
    Outside it was surprisingly light. The full moon that had lit up the beach for Gordon and Natalie the night before was at
     half-mast in the sky. After a moment or two of adjustment, I could see everything distinctly—the bushes, the sea oats, the
     sand