The Rampant Reaper Read Online Free PDF

enormous commitment.”
    â€œCharlie? I quit.” And the Danielle Steel of Tampa, Florida, hung up on her agent.
    â€œEdwina, I swear I’ll never take on another book author. I’m sticking to screenwriters from now on. They usually have some clue about the reality of the industry.”
    â€œYou’ve been saying that ever since you went to L.A. and got a big head. I liked you better in New York.” Charlie’s mom was beginning to sound like herself again.
    Edwina had paid for Libby’s childcare as well as Charlie’s out-of-state college tuition and living expenses in hopes that Charlie would become a high-school English teacher. Instead, Charlie went into a low-paying editorial job in D.C., which required more subsidizing, and then on to a literary agency in Manhattan, which required a lot more subsidizing. It wasn’t until Charlie was hired away by Congdon and Morse Representation in Beverly Hills that she began to pay her little family’s way in the world. She owed her mother too much for comfort.
    â€œSo, is this the house where you lived with your parents?” Charlie started the Lumina.
    â€œNo, Charlie, this is the house where you were born.”
    Charlie let the engine die and looked again at Edwina Greene and the haunted house that didn’t need a ghost.

CHAPTER 5

    â€œ A RE YOU TRYING to tell me that I’m from Myrtle, too? Is that why I had to come here with you?”
    â€œIn a way, Charlie. In a way.”
    â€œBut you said you adopted me from an agency in Boulder.”
    â€œJust let me sort some things out. I can’t believe you had no interest in this before now. At the end of this road, turn right.”
    Charlie’d always figured one family was complication enough in this life and hadn’t been that curious about probably some poor embarrassed pregnant teenager. Charlie was a lot more interested in friends and her status among them and the allurements of life in general. Until she became a poor embarrassed pregnant teenager.
    This road ended at a white rock wall resplendent in a winered ivy intent upon covering it completely one year soon. The crushed rock of the road narrowed to pass through a gate and beneath an ornate wrought-iron arch in which GENTLE OAKS was lettered in among curlicues and metal leaves. The crushed rock in and around Myrtle was white like the bridge at its entrance instead of rock-colored, which Charlie thought of as gray like the tombstones in Myrtle’s crowded little graveyard.
    Gentle Oaks, Uncle Elmo had explained, was one of the three viable businesses owned by Harvey Rochester, native son who’d returned to make good. “Smart man, but he talks funny.”
    Gentle Oaks, judged by its drive, should have been a fabulous mansion. It was, instead, the last stop for many before
the Myrtle Cemetery. Unlike the grain elevator and the railroad station, converted into a restaurant—the other two businesses of Harvey’s—Gentle Oaks was labor-intensive and the largest employer in town. And Myrtle was lucky for it, because in most small towns around, the women had to travel to a monolithic hospital system in Mason City for work. Ice and snow storms could make that a worry.
    Uncle Elmo was a wealth of information. Since Edwina had gone reticent on her again and on her place of birth, she would ask him when they got back to the home place instead of badgering the woman beside her. Charlie was never sure whether love among the three generations of her female family was really displaced fierce loyalty or loyal fierceness. Talk about dysfunctional.
    Edwina could control her progress down memory lane at least long enough to confirm that the trees towering over the drive were oaks. They looked suspiciously like half of those at the cemetery. Humongous, with black bark and huge brown leaves with knobby fingers. The other half of the graveyard’s forest were maples with huge leaves and jagged