The Stranger Beside You Read Online Free PDF Page B

tonight.  All I could do was pray for sunrise.  I had every reason to believe that Tom would be home by lunch.  Optimistic, I know, but I had to cling to that hope.  I sat and waited, wide-eyed and terrified, listening to all the sounds that go bump in the night, wondering who had been in the attic.
     

 
     
    5
     
    Rosemary Gladwell heard him coming down the stairs.  She had been awake for what felt like a couple of hours.  She turned her head in the direction of his footsteps.  He turned the key in the lock and turned on the light.
    He set her meal on the overturned cardboard box beside the bed frame and stared down at her.  He always wore dark sunglasses.  He nodded at the plate of food.  She finished her meal and drank the last of the water.  She dreaded the return of the darkness.  The man with the beard took the plate, killed the light, and locked the door.  Then she listened to his heavy footsteps as he climbed the stairs leading up from her basement.
    •  •  •
    The man with the beard rinsed the plate and the drinking glass at the sink in the dark.   He rarely turned on any lights in Rosemary Gladwell’s home.  He removed the sunglasses and set them on the kitchen table and stood in the stillness of the old woman’s home and took a moment to catch his breath.  He was still sweating.
    In the upstairs bedroom, he walked to the window that faced north over the neighborhood and spread the drapes apart about eighteen inches.  It was still dark outside, but dawn would be rolling around soon.  A folding table stood next to the window against the wall.  Most of his equipment was on the table.  He went to one corner of the room and lifted his telescope, carrying it to the window.  He spread the tripod legs and aimed the lens through the part in the drapes.  He looked through it and adjusted the dial until the Nelson home slowly came into focus.  He snapped a pair of padded earphones over his head and plugged the jack into the output receptacle on the laptop computer open on the table.  The software on the screen showed a flourish of sound waves.  In recent weeks he’d spent many hours in the dark in this room listening to the sounds and voices inside the Nelson home.
    He had enjoyed the earlier activity, watching those pathetic cops blunder around looking for clues.  What a joke, especially the tall one.  The man with the beard knew he could have very easily killed them both if he had stayed.  They were lucky.  So was Brynn Nelson, because he could have killed her too.
    The presence of the FBI was what bothered him.  It was an unexpected development.  He needed to know exactly what they had taken from the house.  He had watched until they left and then had snooped around as quickly and thoroughly as possible until Brynn returned.  The search had left him a little worried.  He had documented all the events of the night in the spiral notebook he’d used from the day he’d first entered Rosemary Gladwell’s home.  Every detail had been logged and dated.
    The Nelson home was quiet now.  Perhaps she had gone back to sleep.
    The man with the beard was patient.  This was his job and he had nowhere better to be, so he simply waited, staring through the lens at the Nelson home, watching for the next flourish of activity, eager for his next glimpse of the lovely Brynn Nelson.
     

 
     
    6
     
    Clive Rozzell didn’t believe in marriage.  His mother had been a drunk and a tramp, and his father had used her as a punching bag.  They were divorced by the time young Clive learned to ride a bicycle.  The court made him choose between the two.  He picked his father because his father was employed.  His mother died ten years later of liver failure and his father married and divorced twice more before sticking a shotgun in his mouth when Clive was seventeen. 
    So Clive had little use for a bride of his own.  Instead, he believed in recreational sex and short-term girlfriends.  When