SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set by Billie Sue Mosiman

Author:Billie Sue Mosiman [MOSIMAN, BILLIE SUE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-02-24T18:30:00+00:00

Charlene, a tall woman carrying twenty extra pounds around her forty-year-old waist and hips, jogged as easily around the house behind Shadow as any Olympic champion. She didn't even breathe hard or become flushed. Mainly, she thought, it was a trick of the mind, what the body went through. She knew how to turn off her mind from the event the body experienced so that she wasn't affected greatly by either exercise, heat, cold, even pain.

Especially pain. She had known such physical and mental pain, that she had long ago learned how to escape. Now, as she pumped her legs and swung her long arms in the baggy sweater, pacing herself ten feet behind Shadow as they circled the brooding old brick mansion, Charlene went over her earlier thoughts when she had been sitting on the rug, Shadow's voice coming through to her from the stairway as through veils of thick gauze. She was . . .

Alone. So alone. She thought she was alone, anyway, believed it fully. She was ten years old and her father had taken the other children to town. Charlene, the eldest, was supposed to clean house before they returned. Mother was dead. There were always too many chores to do and only Charlene to do them.

Someone was coming to visit—one of Daddy's friends from the chemical plant, his only friend, the man he played dominoes with at the ice house in Houston on Friday nights and bowled with on Saturdays. Charlene was making the beds—the twins' bunks in one of the bedrooms at the back of the house—and she was perfectly content to do the work. She had never whined or pretended it was too much trouble for a ten-year-old to take on so many household duties. She rather liked the mindlessness of housework. She was one of those people destined to find joy where she could, and cleanliness and orderliness gave her a sense of satisfaction that provided her with little gifts of cheer and accomplishment throughout each day.

She tucked the sheet beneath the thinly worn mattress. She squared the corners. She plumped the pillows in their cases and set them just so at the head of the bunks.

She never knew he—that horrible man, that demon man—was coming. She was whistling beneath her breath—“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so”—and he crept up behind her before she ever knew someone was in the house with her. He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her off her feet, the pillow she had in her hands falling to the floor. She shrieked, trying to twist free, heart racing, her song cut off in mid-tune.

“Hush now,” he said gruffly. “You wouldn't want your daddy to find out you lured me in here and took off all your clothes for me.”

She recognized the voice as belonging to her father's friend who wasn't supposed to be there until dinner time. She had heard it on the telephone when he called and she had met him once at his car when he picked up her father for Saturday-night league bowling.

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