Sunshine and Blood by Roxie Randall

Author:Roxie Randall [Randall, Roxie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B0C3YCJYJG
Goodreads: 144719459
Published: 2023-04-27T22:00:00+00:00

8. On Her Doorstep

For a while after Hartwell had left, Lola couldn’t quite get her thoughts in order. She felt strangely unsettled.

She made a half-hearted attempt to clean up the mess Hartwell had made but gave up not long after. The place didn’t quite feel right to her anymore, like it belonged to someone else and she’d just stumbled into it. She managed to tidy up her bedroom a little after getting changed, but soon found herself wandering back into the living room, where she knelt amongst the scattered books and began sorting through them. She’d barely filled a single shelf of the bookcase before getting back to her feet and drifting aimlessly into the bathroom. There, she straightened up the cabinet over the sink and picked up the clean towels before walking back into the chaos of the kitchen.

The tidying could keep, she told herself, there would be more than enough time to get to it later. Right now there was something nagging at her mind, some thought that wouldn’t leave her alone, but wouldn’t make itself plain either. She picked up Doran’s address book from where she had thrown it, flicked through it briefly, then placed it on top of the bookcase for safekeeping. She moved through to the kitchen, where she made herself a cup of weak and watery tea but didn’t drink it; instead she just sat by the table, watching the tea slowly get cold.

After she’d boiled the kettle for the second time, something inside her mind seemed to snap, not apart but together, and the sensation was like finding exactly where a particularly oddly shaped piece of a jigsaw puzzle finally fitted.

Half an hour later she stepped hastily off a bus that had brought her from the stop three blocks down from her apartment building all the way out to Olympia Heights. Getting off the bus by the Tropical Estates Park meant she would have to walk a little further but it saved a few cents. She walked along the edge of the park, dodging past some kids who were arguing about which unlucky member of their band was to be the Nazi in their ‘let’s pretend’ game of war this time, and made her way east.

After a few minutes she stopped at a small house that was painted a cheerful light blue, perhaps in order to disguise the fact that it was slowly going to seed. There was mold running around the edges of the white framed windows and the once-bright paintwork was now peeling in several places. The best you could say about the grass in the front yard was that it was dying; the worst you could think of was that someone had tried painting dried mud an unconvincing shade of yellowish green. All in all, the whole house looked like it had seen better days but not many of them and none recently.

Lola was half-afraid the doorbell wouldn’t work and so instead she knocked heavily on the door. It was

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