Last Seen Alive: A Mystery by Joanna Schaffhausen

Author:Joanna Schaffhausen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

* * *

Caroline insisted they stay and Ellery was too weary to argue. She found herself back in her old bedroom, which had a fresh coat of sky-blue paint and several of Danny’s paintings framed and hung on the walls. Danny’s old twin bed, earmarked now for Reed, sat up against the far wall while Ellery’s had the window as usual. She approached it cautiously, rounding the foot so she could see out but no one could look in and see her. The wooden floor creaked, making her jump, and she whirled to find Reed returning from the bathroom. “Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,” he said.

“It’s not you. It’s this place.”

He joined her by the window. She could smell the soap from his skin. “We could still decamp to a hotel.”

She realized then that she should have insisted he go. Reed stayed in places that had Egyptian cotton sheets and thick towels, not the nubby Target specials her mother had kindly laid out for them. She curled her toes against the drafty wooden floor. “You can go. I don’t mind.” Her demons lived here, not his.

His phone buzzed from across the room. He picked it up and read the message. “They didn’t get any interviews at the prison today. Some sort of food poisoning incident shut the place down. Ben says they’ll join us here tomorrow anyway.”

“Great,” Ellery muttered.

“Let them bring the cameras and see how far they get. Sharon West means business. She’ll have them filming from somewhere outside of Detroit.”

Ellery dropped the curtain with a small smile. “Yeah, in a fight between Sharon West and Kate Hunter, I’ll take the woman running the whole Chicago PD.”

Reed pulled down the bedsheets across the room. He was already dressed in his boxers and a T-shirt, no longer bothering with any pretense of formality with her. When he turned to find her watching, he said, “I’d rather stay, if it’s okay with you.”

“It’s okay with me.”

They crawled beneath their separate sheets and turned out the light. Ellery’s narrow bed had once felt like a coffin. After Danny was gone, it had been her alone in the room and her mother’s restless footsteps pacing the house at night. Ellery had been sure if she sat up and looked out the window that she would see Coben under the streetlamp waiting for her. She sat up to check, pushing back the curtain. The street was empty. The snow flurries had stopped, leaving the night clear and cold.

Across the room, Reed let out a soft snore, and she dropped the curtain to look at his familiar shape, just visible in the murky light. He could sleep anywhere at any time, like his brain had an on/off switch, no matter what kind of horrors his eyes had seen that day. She envied his ability to compartmentalize, to wall off his own troubled past so it didn’t distract him all the time. For Ellery, the memories rose up like a creature from the depths whenever her body got quiet.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.