Read Online Unhinged by Sarah Graves - Free Book Online

“Harry, that is terrible. I’m so sorry. But—”
    A grin twitched his lips: not a nice grin.
    Not at all. “But you still want to know what all that’s got to do with you, Jacobia? Or with Sam? Think about it.”
    So I did, and what I came up with made my stomach do a queasy roll. “Harry, you’re not telling me you believe—”
    “Not
believe,
” he interrupted harshly. “I
know
.”
    Wade came to the table, his grey eyes narrowed protectively. “Harry, are you saying someone did this deliberately to Sam?”
    “It had to be an accident,” I insisted. “That old car . . .”
    But Wade was frowning. “George towed it over to the garage. Sam was awake when he got here, he said the brakes just went out.”
    “I heard him say that, too,” Harry put in. “That’s why . . .”
    I shook my head dumbly. “The brakes? You mean completely?”
    Wade nodded, his face grim. Another thought struck me as my mind danced away from the notion of someone trying to hurt Sam.
    “Harry. You said you’d met me
again
. After I’d gone to live with my aunt and uncle.”
    He smiled almost pityingly. “The first time? I don’t think you’d remember that. The blast blew you out of the house into the yard. A piece of sheet metal landed on top of you. Other wreckage, like bricks and so on, piled on that.”
    Dimly, I did remember: not the details, specifically, but a tremendous sound, the smell of the smoke, a soaring sensation and screaming that I later understood must have been sirens.
    And me. “A man came,” I recalled slowly. “Dressed in blue. He looked into my eyes. He said everything would be all right.”
    It wasn’t, but never mind. “A young cop. He pulled me out.” I looked at Harry. “Was it you?” I whispered. “You saved me?”
    Harry nodded slowly, his eyes glistening. He swallowed hard, his throat working before he could speak.
    “That was me. And it’s great to see you doing so well, Jake. But I’ve brought something.
Someone
. I didn’t know . . .”
    His voice broke wretchedly. “I’m sorry, Jacobia. So sorry.”
    A tear slid down his cheek.
     
     
    The next day when my panic over Sam had faded I could sort my thoughts better, but the result didn’t feel like improvement. Harriet Hollingsworth had been murdered; I remained quite sure of that.
    But now there was a new wrinkle. The guy living in her house was a blast from my past, and he believed Sam’s accident wasn’t one. That instead it had something to do with
him
.
    “Well,” Ellie said, frowning, “what he told you checks out.”
    We’d let the answering machine take phone calls, getting the incoming numbers from the caller ID box and noting them down for later callbacks. Everyone we knew wanted to be told Sam was all right and reporters from the
Tides
and the
Examiner
had called, too. But I hadn’t felt like talking to anyone.
    Instead via the Internet on Sam’s computer we had confirmed most of the details of Harry’s tale, the ones that were publicly available, anyway. Newspaper archives of
The New York Times
gave the NYPD’s version of the story Harry had told me the night before.
    Chillingly, the on-line articles delivered no photos of any police officers. They’d appeared in the print editions, a sidebar noted, but were later judged inappropriate for electronic versions in case a cop’s face caused him or her to be targeted by what one quoted officer termed colorfully, “a fruitcake from afar.”
    The phrase was funny but the message behind it wasn’t: that someone had spooked even the cops of the NYPD. Ordinarily the devil himself couldn’t scare one of them, I mused as I marched downtown with Monday frisking along beside me.
    I strode past the Top Cat truck, parked in front of the Peavey Library. Two production workers were eyeing the massive old Revolutionary War cannon on the lawn as if wondering how to fire it. I could have told them they’d have to get the log out of its throat, first. During the War of 1812