The Warning Read Online Free PDF Page A

presented in question form for rhetorical effect. That’s why, even though I have answers to each and every one, I don’t feel like sharing them with her.
    It’s not true that I have nothing invested in Tom Rigbey. Not if hope counts as a thing. Hope for what, though? Nothing will happen. Nothing can. I tore my email address off the note. He can’t contact me even if he wants to.
    Perhaps I ought to try to believe Nadine Caspian, as a consolation. If I can make myself believe I’ve had a narrow escape . . .
    “Eat your pasta, Chloe. Going off your food because Nadine the receptionist might have unfairly maligned your favorite stranger makes no sense. You’re living in a complete fantasy world. Whatever your instincts are telling you right now, for God’s sake do the opposite. Your judgment’s completely askew.”
    “We don’t need to talk about it anymore,” I say quietly.
    “Good. Fantastic.”
    “He hasn’t got my email or phone number, so. End of story.”
    “Praise the Lord.”
    “You’re forgetting that I’ve actually met him. I’m not weighing Nadine’s hearsay against nothing, I’m weighing it against my own first-hand experience. Tom Rigbey did something amazing for me and Freya, something no one else would have done. I spoke to him, we chatted. I just don’t believe her!”
    “Right. Because no manipulative psychopaths know how to chat nicely and fool people. If someone can make a few witty comments about an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, that proves they’re a good person.”
    “So now you’re making him a psychopath?” I snap.
    “You know what, Chloe? I do believe her. I don’t think people say things like that for no reason. I haven’t got any proof, but I don’t like the sound of Tom Rigbey. Didn’t from your first mention of him. All this ‘Ma’am’ and ‘Your Highness’ stuff, saluting you, cycling off to the car park for Freya’s music as if someone’s life depended on it . . . It’s too much. Way too much. You said it yourself: ‘He did something no one else would have done.’ And you didn’t ask him to, did you? He overheard, and forced his way in. There was your warning alarm bell, right there—you chose to see it in a positive light because you’re naïve, but if you ask me, it’s creepy.”
    “You could be right,” I say, not really caring if I mean it or not. A lot of my conversations with Lorna end this way. She loves arguing and could go on all night. I hate it, and usually give in.
    I wish I hadn’t taken the note out of the gift bag and torn the top off it. I allowed a stranger to scare me. If I’d taken no notice of her, I would now be looking forward to hearing from Tom Rigbey. He’d have been bound to email and thank me. He might have said something about the present and how much he liked it. Whatever he’d have written, I bet it would have made me laugh. Lorna’s always telling me that she has my best interests at heart, but most of what she says makes me feel worse, not better.
    I wish I’d argued with Nadine Caspian. Tom Rigbey is not a plague in human form. No way. That’s too over the top. I don’t buy it. He’s sweet, and not dangerous at all. I trusted him with my car keys, and he didn’t let me down. I’m the one who’s let him down by allowing myself to be scared away by the spiteful insinuations of a stranger.
    And now I’ll never hear from him again.

 
    Chapter 6
    E XCEPT—AND THANK YOU, life, for being so surprising and almost making me believe in God—I do hear from Tom Rigbey again, and in a pleasingly familiar way. Four days after my depressing dinner with Lorna, I’m sitting on a bench on Castle Street, waiting for Freya to emerge from her first Joseph rehearsal, when I hear a man’s voice singing a song:
    “Down yonder green valley, where streamlets meander / When twilight is fading I pensively rove / Or at the bright noontide in solitude wander, / Amid the dark shades of the lonely ash grove; / T was there,