Read Online The Garden of Dead Dreams by Abby Quillen - Free Book Online Page A

emanated from Candy’s nose. Her head circled lazily. She flicked her eyes open, and Etta stepped backward.
    Candy frowned. “We’re out of biscuits, and the coffee’s long gone.” She rounded the ball of dough with her chubby fingers and then dropped it and punched both fists into it, flattening it onto the table.
    “Is Carl here?”
    Candy pretended to look under the table. “Hey Carl, take off your invisibility cloak.”
    Etta smiled. “Do you know where he is?”
    Candy shrugged. “If you must know, he and the director were in here for like a half hour whispering back and forth about something then the hillbilly says he has to go somewhere and he doesn’t know when he’ll be back, and now I’m stuck making all the food for the biggest party of the year.” She rolled her eyes. “He promised some stupid girls are supposed to come help, but did they even bother to show up?”
    “I’m one.” Etta smiled. “I’m Etta.”
    Candy said something, but a gong reverberated through the room then another and another. They grew louder and louder.
    “Can we turn that down?” Etta shouted.
    “It’s Peas Lite,” Candy shouted back.
    Etta tried to make the words make sense. Then she spotted the stereo on a shelf across the room and made a beeline to it, grasping for the knob. The gong faded to a more humane volume. The top CD on a pile next to the stereo said Peace Light. Etta glanced through the rest of the pile. Jewels of Silence , Transformation Trance , Music for Healing , and six or seven CDs by someone named Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Etta slid one of the Jimmie Dale Gilmore CDs from the middle of the pile.
    “Be glad the hillbilly’s not here, or we’d be listening to that. ‘The chef gets to pick the music,’ he says. Just my luck I have to work for a hillbilly.”
    Etta set the CD on top of the others. “Carl doesn’t like New Age music?”
    “He calls it Sew-age music.”
    Etta laughed and studied a framed photo of a woman propped next to the stereo. The woman was young, mid-twenties perhaps. Her reddish brown hair fell below her shoulders, and she was squinting into the camera like the sun was in her eyes.
    “Let me guess, you’re wondering if the hillbilly has a girlfriend.”
    “No,” Etta said, even though that’s exactly what she’d been thinking.
    Candy grinned. “You wouldn’t be the first one. You are a pathetic bunch of girls out here, stuck in this forest with that weird chastity code, all hot and heavy for the hillbilly. You should see the ladies at the grocery store in Hicksville Jackson fawn over him. ‘Can I help you, Carl?’ ‘Let me get that, Carl.’ It’s disgusting. I wouldn’t worry too much about the girl in the photo though. She’s dead.”
    Etta’s face filled with heat. Dead? She opened her mouth to ask what happened to the pretty woman, but decided against it. She glanced at the door. Where was Olivia? “So, do you want me to cut up vegetables or something?”
    Candy dropped the dough ball onto the table. “We’re going to need five quiches—two vegetarian, two with bacon and sausage, and one with smoked salmon. The ingredients are in here.” She wiped her hands on her apron and started across the room.
    “Quiches?”
    Candy spun around, her hair hardly moving beneath the hair net. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what quiche is?” The air hissed between her teeth as she exhaled.
    “Of course I do.”
    “Thank God. It would be just my luck if the hillbilly sent me someone who doesn’t even know how to cook. Don’t wait for a hand-written invitation. Follow me.” Candy pulled open the door to the walk-in refrigerator.
    Etta trailed behind the intern.
    * * *
    Four hours later, Etta’s T-shirt and jeans were coated with flour, her upper back was stiff, and she never wanted to hear another chime, gong, or synthesizer for the rest of her life. But as she scanned the steel table holding her five quiches, in addition to the crab cakes; bacon-wrapped