Read Online Hide and Seek by Jack Ketchum - Free Book Online Page B

to see this, to see what was underneath.
     
    It was good to know I could help her just by being there. I felt oddly comforted. I'd never cared for her more.
     
    It was quite a moment.
     
    I remember we'd turned onto Northfield Avenue when I felt her straighten up beside me. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her wipe the tears off her face. It was a single harsh gesture with the fingertips of both hands. I heard her sniffling back the mucus and heard her clear her throat. We turned to one another at the same time.
    For me it was just a glance before I had to look back to the road again. But I felt her stare on me long after that, measuring me somehow.
     
    When she spoke, her voice was gentle, but I sensed that she'd turned a corner again, and what lay beneath it was not. I'd seen a crack in the wall, no more than that. Her voice ran drifts of ectoplasm over me like the thin, strong lines of a spider.
     
    "I want to go back."
     
    "You want me to take you home?"
     
    "Please. Yes."
     
    "All right."
     
    We weren't far from there. We drove in silence. I turned onto her street and noticed a pothole in the road I hadn't seen when we'd

IDE AND SEEK

passed it before. It seemed out of place on that one good street in all Dead River.
     
    I parked across from her house and put the pickup in parking gear. It rumbled: the idle was running high again. I put my arm across the seat and turned to ask her if she wouldn't like to tell me about it before she went inside again. I wanted to know. It wasn't just curiosity.
    She was putting me through some very fast changes. I felt she'd cut me off again, done it quickly and thoroughly, and I wanted back in. She opened the curbside door.
     
    "Wait for me here."
     
    She closed the door carefully, quietly.
     
    I turned off the car and watched her.
     
    She crossed the street and walked up the field stone path that cut the lawn in two and led up to the porch. There were low shrubs planted in a rock garden roughly as deep as the porch on either side. They ascended in height, the symmetry almost too neat to please the eye. She stopped in front of the first step and looked off to her left. She was looking for something on the ground.
     
    Now what the hell?
     
    She took a few steps to the left and kept on looking. I had the ridiculous momentary impression that it was night crawlers she was after. That we were going fishing. She bent down into the garden and took something up in each hand, seeming to weigh them before she stood again.
     
    From that point on her movements were completely economical. The Casey I was used to, and even more so.
     
    It was clear that she knew exactly what she was doing. She took three steps backward onto the lawn and looked up into the left front window.
    There was a light burning inside from a floor lamp. I tried to remember the layout of the house, and I thought it would have to be the den, her father's workroom.
     
    There is something terrible to me about the sound of breaking
    I remember we had a cat when I was a kid who woke us all one night by knocking a cheap cut-glass vase off the kitchen table. I was on my feet and into the kitchen so fast that I wasn't fully awake when

I got there. With the result that the sole of my foot took seven or eight stitches.
     
    That's how it was this time too.
     
    I think my hand was on the ignition as soon as her rock went crashing through the window. I think the car was in drive and my foot on the brake before the shattering sound even left my ears. Part of it was instinct, part of it self-preservation.
     
    It was her house. But I had the feeling it would be my ass.
     
    My throat felt constricted.
     
    "Jesus!" I yelled. "Come on!"
     
    Somehow I couldn't get her attention.
     
    She was still moving in that same determined way across the field stone path and then across the right side of her lawn, ignoring me. I knew instantly what she was doing, where she was going. I knew it like I knew how my head would hurt if