Read Online Dark Lie (9781101607084) by Nancy; Springer - Free Book Online Page A

child in the backseat. When I drove my ruined car into Appletree, nothing seemed familiar. Not that the town had grown; if anything, Appletree seemed to be decaying. It should have been about closing time for the shops on Main Street, but—what shops? I slowed my Kia to a crawl, peering around, trying to make sense of shadows. If there were shops anymore, they closed early. The heart of the town seemed hollow and empty, as if night were somehow much later here than elsewhere. The Victorian-era town clock still stood at the square, but one of its faces read 9:35, another read 10:17, the third read 9:52. . . . I didn’t look at the fourth face on the clock’s ornate blockhead. Appletree’s dark silence combined with my overstressed condition made the three-story buildings of downtown seem to loom déjà vu surreal. I felt a chill, as if Appletree itself were my enemy, a stalker, lying in wait for me, plotting to abduct me.
    Stop it, Dorrie,
I told myself.
You’re wigging out.
Light-headed. In need of food. And also, I realized at that moment, going into a stress-induced lupus flare. As soon as I paid attention to myself, I could feel the fever skewing my perception. I could feel the fiery red rash popping out on my face, the membranes in my mouth and nose ulcerating. I could feel every joint starting to swell, aching even more than usual.
    Still crawling along in the Kia, I fumbled a couple of Tylenol from my purse and gulped them dry, having long since learned to take pills without water, on the go, as casually as most people partook of fast food. As soon as I possibly could, I needed to take my heavy-duty lupus meds, or I’d end up in the hospital.
    But not yet. Those pills would knock me out, and I had to be able to function. I had to drive a car. I had to keep going until Juliet was safe.
    I had to find a place where I could phone—
    Whoa! Was that really a public phone on the next corner?
    Sure enough, it was, standing one-legged, like a stunted metal stork. NO PARKING signs stood guard on my side of the street, so I turned in at the cross street—not a street, really, but a side road too narrow to park along. I passed a large brick building, apparently deserted, its windows boarded up with plywood, then pulled into a gravel lot behind it.
    And nearly screamed.
    The van!
    Or for a moment, as my headlights caught on it, I thought it was the van. With its rear end toward the street, it stood by itself in a far corner of the premises, the only vehicle there besides mine. I slammed on my brakes, gawking at it, not so sure now; was it the right color? Hard to tell in the dark, but it seemed to be some light neutral shade, spectral in the glare of my headlights. I eased my Kia closer to it, and yes, the chrome lettering on its back doors read DODGE RAM . Yes, stripes of darker paint ran along its sides. My heart pounded harder—
    But then I shook my head, angry at myself. Where was the ram logo I had seen on the wheel cover? This van had no logo, no wheel cover, and no spare wheel. Moreover, any dunce could see that this van was a derelict with four flat tires and no license plate, a junker left to rust in the weeds that had sprung up in the elbow of the parking lot’s rotting plank fence. This heap probably didn’t even have an engine in it.
    Scolding myself,
Dorrie, you can’t go seeing that van everywhere,
I swung my steering wheel all the way around and stepped on the gas. In order to park near the public phone, I scooted the Kia to the other end of the parking lot from the derelict van, close to the abandoned brick building.
    And received what may have been the nastiest shock of my life.
    Sweeping the concrete foundation of the boarded-up building, my headlights illuminated a sizable sample of graffiti printed in crisp black letters on the pale exterior of the basement. It read:
    CANDY GOT LAID HERE
    * * *
    Bless my right foot, it stamped on the brake before