Read Online Blood of Eden by Tami Dane - Free Book Online Page B

brand-new, unopened box of cold tablets. No antibiotics. Not even a bottle of Pepto.
    Was it possible she’d felt no symptoms until immediately before she’d died?
    I wandered out into the hallway, checked the second bedroom, which looked nothing like the rest of the house, from what I’d seen. With the dark walls, clutter, and clothes strewn about, I surmised it was the habitat of a teenager. I confirmed it with a quick look at the desk. Buried under a mountain of books and papers, CDs and DVDs, was a photograph of a blond girl with braces; her arms were flung over the shoulders of two girlfriends.
    Not wholly convinced a person couldn’t catch a disease in that room, I headed down the hall to the third bedroom, which had been converted into a cozy home office. The desk’s top was clear of clutter, the laptop shut off, the cover shut. Behind the desk, the window’s shades were up. The house sat so close to its neighbor, I could make out the details of the Justin Bieber poster hanging on the hot pink wall in what must’ve been a kid’s bedroom next door. I moved closer to the window to get a better look.
    Was this bedroom, with its bed piled high with stuffed animals and its desk cluttered with the trappings of a child—a bug house, the Potato Head family, and a plush unicorn—the average room of a kid?
    When I was younger, I’d been anything but average. And now I assume, my room had been as unusual as myself. My walls hadn’t been papered with pages ripped out of teen magazines, like this one. The yellow walls—painted that shade because my mother had read yellow stimulated brain cells—had been completely obscured by prints by Renoir, Gauguin, and Monet, long before I’d graduated from elementary school. My desk had been buried under a mountain of inventions—gadgets and gizmos I’d erected from disassembled small appliances.
    There’d been a very noticeable lack of stuffed critters on my bed.
    Allergies. Polyester-filled plushies were dust mite magnets.
    Something thumped downstairs, and I tugged the string, lowering the blinds, turning back to the task at hand. Hoping our victim might keep a journal on her computer, I opened it and powered it up. Luck was on my side—she hadn’t set up a password.
    I was in.
    The wallpaper was a photograph of Deborah Richardson and the blond-haired teenager from the photograph in the messy room. First thing I checked was her Web browser. My fave Web sites—the ones I visited every day—launched automatically when my browser opened. If my luck continued, Deborah Richardson’s would do the same thing.
    Bingo.
    Deborah was an eBay shopper. Her Yahoo! mail page loaded. I skimmed the messages in her in-box. Spam. She’d left nothing unread before she died. That told me she’d signed on and opened her e-mail that morning before leaving for work. I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, so I shut down the computer. There didn’t seem to be anything useful on it.
    Out in the hallway, I met JT.
    â€œFind anything?” he asked, chewing on the end of his pen.
    â€œNothing. It’s like she woke up that morning and everything was normal. She checked her e-mail, made her bed, got dressed, and headed for work, just like any other day. I don’t see any sign that she was sick, not even some aspirin. I don’t know what we’re looking for.”
    He smacked his notebook with his pen. “The fiancé didn’t give me much to work with either.”
    â€œThere is a teenager living here too, though. Maybe we could talk to her, ask if she noticed her mother being sick.”
    â€œYes, Chapman told me. She’s a counselor at a summer camp. She had to go up a couple of weeks before camp starts for training.” He motioned toward the stairs with a tip of his head. “Ready to head out?”
    â€œYeah, I guess so.” I clomped down the stairs after him, trying not to