Read Online Secret Identity by Paula Graves - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Paula Graves
Tags: Suspense
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someone was out there scouring the woods for Amanda, it wouldn’t be hard to find the Charger in its hiding place. “We’ll deal with that if it arises.”
“Are you sure there isn’t a tracker of some sort on your car?” she asked a few minutes later.
“Short of tearing it down and putting it back together, I can’t be sure,” he admitted. “But I looked at all the obvious places, and a few not so obvious ones. I didn’t see a thing. And the GPS signal detector I used didn’t spot anything.”
“If we get out of here, we should check again.” She barely got the sentence out past an enormous yawn.
“Why don’t you try to get some sleep?” Rick suggested. “You’ve got to be beat.”
Though the light was nearly gone from the cave, he could see her just well enough to notice her back straightening as she spoke. “I’m fine.”
She wasn’t fine, but if she needed to maintain that facade in front of him, he wasn’t going to take that away from her. “Okay. Not going to be much else we can do in here, though. No candles, no books.”
“You can sleep if you want to,” she said, her tone indifferent.
He wasn’t sure he bought the nonchalance, however. There was a faint thread of tension in her voice that made him wonder if she was hiding something from him.
Of course, the more obvious question at this point was, what wasn’t she hiding from him?
THE NIGHT SEEMED ENDLESS, and despite her determination not to, Amanda fell asleep sometime deep in the morning hours. Following her into her slumber, bleak memories chased her through her dreams, a jumble of horrors and regrets that had been her constant, unwelcome companions almost every night for the past three years.
The dreams always began with no sign of threat in sight. In this dream, she was ten years old again, sitting on the front stoop of the house in McComb, sketching pictures of dragons and unicorns in colored pencils in the sketch pad her Aunt Debbie gave her for her birthday a few days earlier.
She wasn’t unaccustomed to the sounds of voices raised in anger. Her mother drank too much, and she tended to pick men who were cruel-mouthed bullies. How much those unpleasant attributes fed on each other was something Amanda had never really been able to decide.
By the age of ten, she’d grown to ignore the fights for the most part, so when the shouts rose over the sounds of birds chirping in the trees and the lawn mower buzzing busily in the neighbor’s yard down the street, Amanda blocked out the noise and concentrated on achieving the perfect shimmery green required for a dragon’s wing.
The gunshot, however, had ripped through her self-protective cocoon, setting her nerves rattling.
She’d learned not to be afraid of the fights, because none of her mother’s boyfriends ever struck blows or made threats. The words that passed between them could be violently ugly, but there were lines they never crossed.
But not that morning.
Slowly, her ten-year-old self turned toward the open screen door and peered through the mesh, telling herself that her mother’s boyfriend, Jerry, had turned on the television. That’s all it was. He’d turned on the TV to watch one of his favorite cop shows. She listened hard for the sound of voices coming from the set in the kitchen. But all she heard was a low, keening noise that sounded as if hell itself had opened a window to let a song of suffering escape.
She made herself go into the kitchen. Made herself look at the mess her mother had made. Jerry was on the floor, still alive, feebly swinging at her mother with a butcher’s knife even as his life blood poured out onto the grimy linoleum—
Amanda woke with a start, that sound still ringing in her ears. All around her was darkness and cold. Beneath her aching side, the ground was hard stone.
She was in a cave, she remembered. She was decades older than the ten-year-old in her dream, and in the intervening years, she’d seen worse than the scene she’d
“Are you sure there isn’t a tracker of some sort on your car?” she asked a few minutes later.
“Short of tearing it down and putting it back together, I can’t be sure,” he admitted. “But I looked at all the obvious places, and a few not so obvious ones. I didn’t see a thing. And the GPS signal detector I used didn’t spot anything.”
“If we get out of here, we should check again.” She barely got the sentence out past an enormous yawn.
“Why don’t you try to get some sleep?” Rick suggested. “You’ve got to be beat.”
Though the light was nearly gone from the cave, he could see her just well enough to notice her back straightening as she spoke. “I’m fine.”
She wasn’t fine, but if she needed to maintain that facade in front of him, he wasn’t going to take that away from her. “Okay. Not going to be much else we can do in here, though. No candles, no books.”
“You can sleep if you want to,” she said, her tone indifferent.
He wasn’t sure he bought the nonchalance, however. There was a faint thread of tension in her voice that made him wonder if she was hiding something from him.
Of course, the more obvious question at this point was, what wasn’t she hiding from him?
THE NIGHT SEEMED ENDLESS, and despite her determination not to, Amanda fell asleep sometime deep in the morning hours. Following her into her slumber, bleak memories chased her through her dreams, a jumble of horrors and regrets that had been her constant, unwelcome companions almost every night for the past three years.
The dreams always began with no sign of threat in sight. In this dream, she was ten years old again, sitting on the front stoop of the house in McComb, sketching pictures of dragons and unicorns in colored pencils in the sketch pad her Aunt Debbie gave her for her birthday a few days earlier.
She wasn’t unaccustomed to the sounds of voices raised in anger. Her mother drank too much, and she tended to pick men who were cruel-mouthed bullies. How much those unpleasant attributes fed on each other was something Amanda had never really been able to decide.
By the age of ten, she’d grown to ignore the fights for the most part, so when the shouts rose over the sounds of birds chirping in the trees and the lawn mower buzzing busily in the neighbor’s yard down the street, Amanda blocked out the noise and concentrated on achieving the perfect shimmery green required for a dragon’s wing.
The gunshot, however, had ripped through her self-protective cocoon, setting her nerves rattling.
She’d learned not to be afraid of the fights, because none of her mother’s boyfriends ever struck blows or made threats. The words that passed between them could be violently ugly, but there were lines they never crossed.
But not that morning.
Slowly, her ten-year-old self turned toward the open screen door and peered through the mesh, telling herself that her mother’s boyfriend, Jerry, had turned on the television. That’s all it was. He’d turned on the TV to watch one of his favorite cop shows. She listened hard for the sound of voices coming from the set in the kitchen. But all she heard was a low, keening noise that sounded as if hell itself had opened a window to let a song of suffering escape.
She made herself go into the kitchen. Made herself look at the mess her mother had made. Jerry was on the floor, still alive, feebly swinging at her mother with a butcher’s knife even as his life blood poured out onto the grimy linoleum—
Amanda woke with a start, that sound still ringing in her ears. All around her was darkness and cold. Beneath her aching side, the ground was hard stone.
She was in a cave, she remembered. She was decades older than the ten-year-old in her dream, and in the intervening years, she’d seen worse than the scene she’d
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