Within the Shadows Read Online Free PDF

haven’t?”
    “But you have.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    “Your big brother knows these things. Trust me.”
    “Trust you? Like the time you hooked me up with that lovely girl who’d been in jail for stabbing her ex-boyfriend?”
    “Okay, you got me. She hadn’t told me about that.”
    “Or how about the fine woman you introduced me to who tried to get me to take her and her mama to a movie on our first date?”
    “I misjudged her, my bad.”
    “Or how about the last nubian princess you were so kind to send my way, who ordered two meals at dinner and said she was taking the other one home to eat later?”
    “I give up!” Eric threw up his hands. “You win. I’ve got no business being a matchmaker.”
    “Exactly. Give it up. I’ll meet the right woman one day, and when I do, I’ll know it, and I’ll marry her. Simple as that.”
    Punctuating his statement, Andrew picked up the hot dog and bit into it. Mustard squirted onto the front of his white shirt.
    Eric laughed. “See, that’s what you get for talking shit.”
    “Very funny. I’ll be back. I’m gonna change shirts.”
    As he climbed the stairs to the second floor, where his bedroom was located, the party sounds faded. He heard an unexpected noise: running water.
    It came from the master bedroom.
    He frowned. Upstairs was off-limits to guests. It was an unstated but implicit rule that everyone obeyed.
    But when he walked inside the bedroom, and from there into the master bathroom, warm mist filled the air. Hot water cascaded into the garden tub. The drain was unplugged.
    He hadn’t turned on the water. He had lived in this house for eleven months, and he had never bathed in the tub, preferring to use the shower stall.
    Who had been in here?

Chapter 2
     
    A ndrew shut off the faucet. He watched the water gurgle down the drain.
    He had no idea who had been in there, or why. It bothered him. Although he enjoyed having guests, he invited them with the stipulation that no one would enter his private space without his permission.
    “Must’ve been a kid, playing around,” he said.
    He checked to see if anything was out of place. All of the items he expected—toothbrush, colognes, lotion, and other toiletries—lay where he expected to find them on the dual-sink vanity. Nothing was missing.
    Still, when he returned downstairs, he’d remind the parents to keep their children from wandering up here.
    He opened the walk-in closet, located off the end of the bathroom. The closet was meticulously organized: shoes hung on a tree; shirts and slacks, grouped by color and season, all faced the same direction; suits arranged by occasion awaited in garment bags; shelves bulged with stacks of folded jeans and T-shirts.
    Whenever a friend saw his closet, they teased him, called him an obsessive-compulsive nut. He didn’t deny it. He loved the sight of order throughout his house. It comforted him.
    Besides, with every piece of clothing in its proper place, dressing for even formal affairs never took longer than a few minutes.
    As he was pulling the soiled shirt over his head, a knock came at the half-open bathroom door.
    “Drew?” It was Carmen. She stepped inside and saw him bare-chested. “Oops, I didn’t know a strip show was about to start. I better get my money.”
    “Bring fifties and hundreds.” He was about to reach for another shirt, then said, “Hey, when I came in here, I found the water running in the tub. Someone was in here.”
    “Really? It was probably one of those Bebe kids, playing where they have no business going.”
    “That’s what I figured. I only wanted to mention it to you.”
    “They know better than to be snooping around,” she said. “I’ll tell them to stay away from up here.”
    “Would you? I’d appreciate it.”
    “No problemo. The kids adore me.”
    “They aren’t old enough to know any better.” He grinned.
    She cracked a smile. “I’ll get you for that one later. And I wanted to tell you—your