The Stranger Beside You Read Online Free PDF Page A

the cops.
    I sat up slowly.
    I closed my eyes and listened as hard as I could.  The sounds of movement had stopped.  The house was silent again, so I opened my eyes and slowly turned my head, tuning my ears at various angles.  Still nothing.   
    I took a deep breath.  Perhaps it was just my imagination, but my heart was still going full throttle.  Then I heard something crash to the floor and my blood turned to ice.
    The sound had come from above me, so I looked at the ceiling.  There was a quick succession of footsteps somewhere upstairs, and I tried to gauge the direction of travel.  From the chopping block on the kitchen counter I selected a knife with a six-inch blade.  In the other hand I held the cordless telephone.  Both of my hands were shaking.
    I crept through the kitchen.  There is a short hallway that leads to the laundry room, and from there a door opens into a mudroom attached to the garage.  I tiptoed barefoot past the washer and dryer.  The tile floor was cool. 
    The sounds stopped again.  I stood for a long minute without blinking, my thumb poised on the number 9 on the cordless phone, ready for action, then I jumped at the sound of the garage door opening, and instinctively retreated a few steps and stood with my back flat against the wall behind the door to the mudroom in case the intruder came barging through. 
    I went out and found the garage door open.  The only car in the garage was Tom’s five-year-old Lexus.  My Volvo was still parked in the driveway.  There was no one there, but the door to the attic was open, the ladder having been unfolded from the ceiling to the garage floor.  My flesh prickled.  Someone had been up there since before I’d come home.
    I grabbed a flashlight from Tom’s tool bench and reluctantly climbed the ladder up to the attic to have a look.  I stood on the third or fourth rung from the top, leaned in and clicked the black button on the flashlight.  The beam of light cut a narrow swath through the dusty blackness.  The attic looked like ninety-percent of all attics in North America.  It was full of boxes of Christmas decorations and all variety of other crap stashed away and mostly forgotten.  I couldn’t see much, but I sure as hell wasn’t going any further up.  If anyone was still up there, I had no intention of introducing myself.
    I hurried down as quickly as possible and ran inside and dialed 911.
    •  •  •
    Rosemary Gladwell had lost all sense of time.
    She had made a heroic attempt at first to keep track of the passage of hours and days but had given up weeks ago.  After what she had believed to be her third full day in total darkness, she’d realized the effort to keep track was futile and might only serve to drive her mad.  Besides, the man with the beard and the hat intentionally varied the time of day he brought her meals so that not even those intervals could be measured or predicted.
    The man with the beard had tied her up in her own basement and left her in the dark.  Rosemary didn’t have a single clue about who he was or what he wanted.  Her last memory of daylight had been when he rang the doorbell and she invited him inside.  He was with the cable company, he’d said, and needed to check the strength of her signal at the box connected to her television.  Rosemary had been all too happy to cooperate because her cable television was just about her only friend left in the world.  Without her TV she could barely think of a reason to get out of bed in the morning.  Inviting the stranger into her home had been a huge mistake.  He’d asked for a glass of water, and when she turned her back he grabbed her.  He put a cloth over her nose and mouth that reeked of chemicals, and Rosemary passed out within seconds.  She awoke to total darkness, bound by a heavy cord and plastic zip-ties.  For hours she wondered where he had taken her. The man had strapped her down to an old rusted bed frame in a locked room.  Only