The Uninvited Read Online Free PDF Page A

live here.”
    “I don’t. I crash sometimes. I have a mattress in case I end up working late.”
    “‘Working late’?”
    “We were talking about the snake skin,” he said.
    “Right.” Mimi shuddered. “That is gross!”
    “Yes, it is.”
    Her arms were still crossed, and she hugged herself a little tighter at the thought of what he was saying. Then the kettle whistled and he got up to attend to it.
    She backed out of his way, but from the way his head was hanging, she didn’t think he was much of a threat anymore. Kind of sweet, really.
    “So, Jay,” she said, her voice upbeat, “what is it you do here? Which is not the same as what are you
doing
here—a question you still haven’t answered.”
    He grinned a little. He was still clearly pissed, but just maybe she could win him over. She had a habit of shooting first and asking later, but she did not want this to get messy.
    “You want some tea?” he asked, good manners winning out over smoldering resentment.
    “Thanks,” she said. “Tea would be good.”
    “There’s no milk,” he said.
    “And no lemon, I guess.”
    He shook his head. “No fridge.” Then, with the tea steeping in a Brown Betty teapot, he resumed his seat at the little table. She pulled out the chair across from him. It was a bright yellow chair that might have seemed cheery under different circumstances.
    “I’m still waiting,” she said.
    But he stirred his tea and wouldn’t look at her.
    “Listen,” she said, “whatever’s been happening here, it wasn’t me. I left New York yesterday and crossed the Peace Bridge at around two this afternoon, entering Canada for the first time in my life.”
    He looked at her candidly.
    “And I hate snakes,” she said. “Except in expensive boots.”
    He smiled. What a treat! Maybe she’d keep him around—as a maid. Then the smile wilted. He sighed and lowered his head. He knitted his fingers together.
    Shit,
she thought.
He’s going to say grace.
    But he was just sad. Sad and drained.
    “This stuff has really gotten to you, huh?”
    He looked up at her and nodded. “You could say that. Somebody obviously doesn’t love me being here.”
    It was the perfect segue. But some instinct made Mimi hold her fire. She knew she’d have to burst this guy’s bubble sooner or later, but she was intrigued. And she wasn’t stupid, either. If somebody didn’t want Jay here, was that somebody going to take kindly to her?
    “It’s not what you’d call an all-out terror campaign,” she said. “I mean you haven’t found any dolls that look like you with pins stuck in them or pentagrams written in blood on the door, right?”
    He chuckled. But then he looked hard at her, and his shiny brown-gold eyes glowed so strongly she had to look away. That wasn’t something she did very often.
    He poured their tea at the counter. “In a way, it’s worse,” he said, handing her a mug. “Come on.”
    He led her from the kitchen into a front room that was empty except for a vacuum cleaner standing guard in one corner and a beanbag chair by the east-side window with a few books and magazines strewn around it. Through a door she saw a mattress on a bare floor in the only other room. The bed was covered with a bright blue comforter.
    There was a stairway with light cascading down it like a warm yellow carpet. She followed him up to the second level, and this was another story altogether. She had heard about this from her father, but he had been vague about the details, either because he’d forgotten or preferred to keep it a surprise. And what a surprise!
    There had been interior walls up here, a bedroom or two, but they were gone now. The space was wide open—a loft—with posts and beams to take the weight of the missing walls. The room was naturally lit by a gable window in the front and one in the back. There was also a window at the east end and two smaller windows to either side of the chimney stack on the west wall. The floor was stained with