Kindred Spirits by Anne Valentine

Author:Anne Valentine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Anne Valentine
Published: 2021-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

MARIA AWOKE IN THE middle of the night to a pounding noise. At this point she was used to the odd sounds of the house settling or the record players coming to life whenever Charles was up and about. But this wasn’t anything like those noises. It was an insistent, heavy pounding coming from downstairs.

Her front door. Someone was practically beating down her front door. Quickly, Maria threw on her robe and rushed down the stairs as quietly as she could in the dark, not daring to turn any lights on for fear of whatever or whoever might be out there. She made her way to the kitchen first, the pounding on the door becoming louder and more aggressive the longer it went on, echoing the heavy thump of her heart in her chest. A chef’s knife slid nearly silently from the block and she pressed the flat edge to her robed thigh as she moved towards the door, heavy breathing masked by the hammering fists on the door.

Just as Maria began to creep towards a window in the hopes of seeing who might be at the door, a voice shouted from the outside.

“Maria! Maria are you in there? Answer me!”

Ashton?

Maria flipped the hall light on and undid the bolt on the door before cracking it open to look out. Sure enough, there was Ashton, the man who’d been helping her chop wood for her generator for the last few months.

“What are you doing here?” she asked in bewilderment. Ashton was dressed in dirty jeans and a rumpled flannel that didn’t seem to have a t-shirt on underneath it. One leg of his jeans tucked itself hap-hazardly into a boot while the other was shucked halfway up Ashton’s shin with the untied boot jammed on. Maria blinked at him in confusion as he pushed his way past her. She hadn’t noticed at first, but he was carrying an almost comically large wrench in his hands.

He walked purposefully into the house, head swiveling back and forth on his neck as he looked through each of the rooms.

“Ashton?” Maria asked. The man walked a circuit of the first floor before he came back to the front door, which Maria had closed and relocked by that point.

“Ashton,” Maria reiterated with some force. “What is going on?” She caught sight of a grandfather clock in the sitting room. Just after 1:30 in the morning.

Ashton passed a hand over his face, some of the tension leaving him.

“Craig got your message - your voicemail,” he told her.

Maria felt herself go cold.

“He told me about it, since I live the closest,” he continued. “Well, about twenty minutes ago Mr. Mathers’ heard some noises outside and went and looked and here’s that car sitting on the shoulder just on the other side of the road. He went out to talk to the driver, but he sped off. Knowing who it might be, I came right over as quick as I could to make sure you were okay.”

Maria blinked up at him.

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