The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) Read Online Free PDF Page A

account.”
    “How long have you known this guy for?”
    “We met in March.”
    “Two months? That’s it? And you’re
engaged?”
    “We…I’m pregnant,” she said. “It wasn’t
planned,” she added quickly. “But…then…I started feeling sick in
the mornings, and I took a test. And…and we decided it would be
best to get married.”
    I was listening but not listening. My
thoughts were a thousand miles away, fast-forwarding through the
years I had spent with her. How good she had been to me. How she
had stuck by me when nobody else had. How much I had loved her. How
I would have done anything for her.
    How could she be engaged with someone else
and pregnant with his child?
    She was mine. She had always been mine.
    I was back on my feet. Anger churned within
me, burning me up from the inside out. My jaw was clenched, my free
fist pumped open, closed, open, closed. I wanted to throw the phone
as far as I could out the window.
    Instead I shut my eyes and tilted my head
back. I took a silent breath. What was my problem? Fuck, I had
slept with Danièle just the other night. Bridgette had every right
to do the same with someone else. She hadn’t planned on getting
pregnant. It happened. So what did I want her to do? Have an
abortion? Stop seeing the guy? What would any of that accomplish?
We were done.
    But we weren’t. I was going to come back. We
were going to start over…
    “Will?” Bridgette said. “Are you there?”
    “Yeah, I’m here.”
    “I know how all this must sound…”
    “I understand. And…congratulations. I’m
happy for you.”
    She didn’t say anything. The line hissed
with long-distance static interference.
    Then: “Thank you, Will.” Her voice was
croaky, and I thought she might be crying. “That means a lot to
me.”
    A chorus of voices sounded in the
background.
    “I should go,” she said.
    I didn’t protest. There was nothing more to
say.
    “Will?”
    “Yeah?”
    “I love you. I always will.”
    “I love you too.”
    I didn’t hang up immediately. Apparently she
didn’t either, because the line noise continued for another five
seconds.
    Then silence, perfect silence.
    She was gone.
     

     
    Sometime later, as the late dusk settled and
shadows lengthened outside my window, I started packing a bag.

Chapter 3
    The name of the pub Danièle had written on
the napkin earlier was La Cave. The façade was nondescript, and I
walked straight past the wooden door and small neon sign on my
first pass down rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud.
    The interior had all the intimacy, intrigue,
and secrecy of a speakeasy. Red cone lamps suspended from the
barrel-vault ceiling cast butterscotch light over the button-tufted
sofas and armchairs and low wood tables. The bar was tucked into
one corner. Behind the fumed-oak counter a chalkboard listed a
variety of cocktails. In another corner sat a white claw-footed
bathtub, filled with ice and green bottles of what looked to be
home-made beer. Good-natured old-timers schmoozed next to crowds of
younger hipsters, voices and laughter raised in a cacophony of
merriment.
    I didn’t see Danièle anywhere and checked my
wristwatch, a six hundred dollar Hamilton that Bridgette had
splurged on for my twenty-fourth birthday.
    It was a quarter past eight. Danièle had
said she would be here between eight and nine. Had she changed her
mind and left early?
    “Excuse me?” I said to a waiter wiping down
a recently vacated tabled. He was a clean-cut guy with a
back-in-fashion mullet, rolled-up cuffs, and a black apron. “Have
you seen a woman, short black hair, a lot of mascara?”
    “Why don’t you use your eyes and look for
her yourself?” he snapped, turning away from me.
    I stared at his back, pissed off, but
letting it go. People say the French are rude, but I’ve found that
stereotype mostly applied to the service class, who could act as
hoity-toity as pop stars; they certainly had no regard for the
Anglo-Saxon maxim, “He who pays the piper calls the