Read Online She's Not There by P. J. Parrish - Free Book Online

up.”
    “O-kay.” Maria pursed her lips. “The Pro’s got a nice touch. Go ahead, try it out.”
    Amelia positioned her hands above the middle row of keys and for a moment it felt like her fingers knew what to do, where to move. Did she know how to type? Had she been a secretary once? She knew what computers were but there were gaps, as if she couldn’t remember the terminology or exactly how to do things.
    “Show me how to search for something,” Amelia asked.
    Maria stabbed at some keys and looked up. “What do you want to search for?”
    “Myself,” Amelia asked.
    Maria’s smile hardened as her eyes took in Amelia’s matted hair, baggy jeans, and rumpled blue shirt. “Listen, maybe you should go to the public library. They can—”
    “No,” Amelia said. “I just need a little help here, and if you can’t be bothered then I will go buy a computer someplace else.”
    Maria blinked several times. “Okay, what’s your name?”
    “Amelia Tobias.”
    Maria tapped some keys and then looked up. “Wow, you’re in a magazine.”
    “Magazine?”
    Maria stepped aside so Amelia could see. It was a page from Florida Design . There was a color photograph of a blonde woman in a red halter dress standing near a pool. A large pink house with palm trees and a white yacht was visible behind the woman. The type below the picture read “Mrs. Alex Tobias in front of her Fort Lauderdale Isles home: ‘When we remodeled Casa Rosa, we were careful to preserve the past.’”
    Preserve the past . . .
    Voices in her head again, and this time one of them was her own.
    This is the house I wanted you to see.
    She could see herself. She was standing in front of the pink house, but it looked nothing like the house in the magazine. It had boarded-up windows, a jungle of vines and trees, a dry fountain, and there was a red sign near the door— F ORECLOSURE. P RICE R EDUCED!
    She could hear screeching sounds from above and see a flurry of acid green wings against a blue sky. The screeching mutated into a man’s voice.
    Mel, this is a teardown. I want something new and clean.
    But I like this place, Alex. This place feels right.
    And then . . .
    The feel of arms enfolding her, his arms, and his lips pressed on hers, and the rustle of palm fronds and dying screams of the wild parrots as they flew away.
    “Is that really you?”
    Maria’s voice brought her back. When Amelia turned to look at her, she knew the young clerk was trying to reconcile the bruised, disheveled woman in front of her with the sleek creature on the computer screen.
    She couldn’t answer. Her headache had returned, and when she looked up at the ceiling, the lights were haloed.
    “I need . . .” Amelia closed her eyes for a second and then opened them. “I need to buy a computer,” she said. She hoisted up the Vuitton duffel. “I need something small and light that I can carry in this.”
    There was new respect in the young woman’s eyes. “I’ve got just what you need—a tablet. Compact, light, and fast, but it comes with sixteen gigs.” Maria smiled. “You can never have enough memory, right?”

    It was just a sliver of black glass and aluminum that weighed only a pound. Five hundred dollars had seemed like too much to pay for the tablet, but the clerk had assured Amelia that she could search for anything with it, that the whole world was hers at the brush of her fingertips.
    She left the store exhausted, her head pounding after the lesson the clerk had given her on how to use the tablet and how to connect to the Internet with the prepaid wireless SIM card she had been able to purchase with cash.
    The mall was warm and crowded now, the people pushing around her in a fast current. The piped-in Christmas carols were like a broken-fluorescent-light buzz in her head.
    See the blazing Yule before us.
    Fa la la la la, la la la la . . .
    The image from the magazine of that blonde woman standing in front of the pool was burned in her brain. Had