Arousing Suspicions by Marianne Stillings

Author:Marianne Stillings [Marianne Stillings]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780061736612
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Pin your socks in the shape of a cross at the foot of your bed, to keep bad dreams away.

FOLKLORE

He’d lost the book! In the struggle with that cop, he’d dropped the goddamned dream log!

Peter fought to calm himself and think.

Maybe the cops wouldn’t find it. The night had been dark and foggy. Some kid could come across it tomorrow and toss it in the trash. Nobody knew what it was, just a bunch of scribbling that wouldn’t mean anything to anybody who didn’t know. Even if the cops did find the thing, it was just one of those blank-page journals his sister had bought and never used. He’d never put his name in it; it would be quite a stretch to connect it to him.

Fingerprints. Damn, yeah, fingerprints. But he’d never been printed, so even if they lifted some, there was nothing to match it to.

But Tabitha…she’d seen it and could identify it as belonging to him.

Peter’s stomach squeezed hard, and he thought he might puke.

Well, nothing he could do about the diary now, he thought. Damn. The only thing he could hope for was that it had been overlooked in the fog. He sure as hell wasn’t going to go back there to look for it.

Dawn played with the horizon, lightening it a shade or two, teasing the sun to rise and give California another perfect day.

He slid the Jag into the garage and turned off the ignition. Finally able to relax, he let his tired body slump behind the wheel as anger and depression hollowed out his insides.

She’d set him up. The woman he’d trusted with his innermost thoughts, with his worst fears and literally his most horrific nightmares, had set him up. She’d been his last hope; now he had none. There was nowhere to turn.

His heart in shreds, his brain a tangled mass of emotions, he walked from the garage toward the private entrance that led upstairs to the bedrooms.

His eyes burned in their sockets as he quickly took the flight of back stairs at the opposite end of the upper hallway from the grand staircase. At the landing, he stopped and listened before heading for his room. The only sound came from the ancient grandfather clock that stood in the marbled foyer below, its deep and steady ticking like the beat of an innocent heart.

Peter rubbed his eyes. Sleep, rest, a total and complete zone-out, that’s what he needed. He’d sort all this out tomorrow. Somehow, some way. He wasn’t a killer, he just couldn’t be. But the dreams…so real…so violent…

“Peter?”

He jerked around to see his sister standing a few feet away in the open doorway of her room. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she wore her gold and black running outfit.

“Z-Zoey,” he stammered. “Kind of early to be going for a run.”

His sister was three years older than he and nearly as tall. She looked as beautiful as she had when they’d crowned her homecoming queen twenty years ago.

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