Stutter Creek Read Online Free PDF

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    Dark wintry trees blurred past. The moon coated her hood with white, and the wind whistled through the tiny gaps around the windows. She thought about the radio, maybe there was a report about a missing boy, but when she turned it on, all she got was static. No radio, no phone. It was as if she had entered the Twilight Zone.
    All at once, she got a calming image of her father. She had never seen him panic. She tried to imagine what he would do, and suddenly, it was as if he were there with her. Beth imagined a whiff of wood smoke, the smell she associated with him and his love of camping and hiking. She felt better. Stronger. Once again, she glanced into the mirror. Beth never noticed the tiny colored lights that glittered briefly near the corner of her eye. She was watching for a mile marker.
    Carefully, she picked up her cell phone and tried to call 911 again. She could feel the adrenalin leaving her body. She vowed to keep trying to call until she reached the DPS. They would check it out. She would tell them she thought she had seen a child. She didn’t have to admit that she thought it could’ve been a ghost.
    Her cell beeped.
    Still no signal.
    Damn.
    A child.
    She slowed and downshifted to execute a u-turn. There’s no way I can drive on if there’s a chance that child was real and not a figment of my tortured imagination. She leaned over and checked the lock on the passenger side door.
    Surely it wasn’t a real boy. I would rather it be an apparition, or even a hallucination . . . anything but a child alone beside a snow-filled bar ditch.
    If I can’t find him, she decided, I’ll drive in to the next town and locate the Police Station. I can’t take a chance that there might be a real little boy out there, alone.
     

Chapter Five
     
    Cursing the big rig, Kurt yanked Danny back down into the ditch. It had been simple to throw the kid, and himself, down into the fluffy white drift of snow. He had only pulled off the road into the trees to grab a few minutes shuteye after putting a good distance between himself and Pine River. But when he awoke, the car had been completely covered in a thin shroud of snow.
    He thought the crunch of tires on gravel might be what had awakened him, and when he’d seen that the driver of the silvery blue Camaro was a woman, alone, he’d sent Danny over to check her out.
    Amanda had been such an easy target. He couldn’t wait to try it again—even if this one wasn’t on his list.
    The list—and more importantly, the plan—was the thing that had kept him going while he was in prison. It was all he thought about. He wasn’t even going to allow himself to get wasted again until he had completed his plan. Kurt knew he was smarter than everyone else. Now he was about to prove it.
    As soon as he had gotten out of prison, he’d gone to work on the plan. The first part had been easy: finding the girls. Now that he was sober, they seemed to be everywhere, and with the help of certain “business” associates, they were extremely easy to locate. One of his “businessmen” from Albuquerque—Dave, the cokehead with the penchant for young women—even gave Kurt access to his computer dating site. These were not hookers masquerading as dates. Nope. This was an honest-to-God dating website made up of fresh-faced college girls. It encompassed most of New Mexico.
    That’s where he’d found Amanda’s picture. She was young and blonde. He thought she would fit perfectly into his plan.
    He immediately contacted her through the site’s message board, and they began to chat. He could be quite charming when he wanted to. On the computer he quoted Rumi and Deepak Chopra, two authors of poetry and enlightenment whose books he’d flipped through while he was in prison.
    Amanda seemed to be somewhat smitten. He made sure he didn’t come across as just another beer-swilling college jerk. Kurt was certain she saw those all the time on campus, or in her job as a nighttime waitress at the