No lights were on. She left them off, and made her way through the darkness to her bedroom. She knew there was no point trying to sleep. She would just toss and turn, wide awake, worrying about Charlie and reliving all the rotten things that had happened during the past fe...
His mother lifted a plate out of the sudsy water. ‘Would you get that, honey?’ ‘Sure.’ He balled up the dishrag. As he backed away, he shot it toward the sink. It flared out, and dropped like a sheet over the rack of dishes waiting to be dried. In two long strides, he was at the kitchen door. He ...
He found himself in the rear of the Jeep, sunbaked and streaming sweat, his clothes sodden. Feeling as if the sun had drained away half his strength, he reached up and grabbed the roll bar and pulled himself to his feet. He stood there, hanging on to it. Marta’s purse and clothes were piled on th...
Through its tinted glass, she watched the cork toss like a tiny boat in a thrashing sea of Burgundy. She held the bottle steady. The tumult eased. The cork swayed back and forth, turning in a lazy way. Murray had always been so good with corks. Plucked them right out. They never ended up in the b...
Nora said. Tyler, in the backseat, kept her eyes down as Jack swung the car onto Beach Lane. She didn’t want to see the road she’d driven yesterday, but her mind dwelled on it: the windowless brick house across the field to the left, the woods to the right, the row of mail...
After dinner, Bert had taken out her map. She had studied it with her flashlight while they sat around the campfire, and found a route that would lead them around the foot of the mountain, avoiding the trail up to Dead Mule Pass. “We can wait and make sure the creeps are on their way up to the pa...
Not indigestion funny, scared funny. I was nervous about Slim finding the spilled perfume and broken glass in her mother’s room, but it wasn’t just that. Dumb as it may seem, I half believed that Julian or some of his gang might be hiding in the house. Because of Rusty’s r...