The Key by Simon Toyne

Author:Simon Toyne
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Fantasy, Suspense, Thriller, Religion
ISBN: 9780062038333
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2012-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 52

Newark, New Jersey

The first thing Liv saw when they turned into her street was the incident tape flapping in the road ahead. The wind that came off the river had torn it away at one end and was whipping it from side to side like a black-and-yellow snake. Ski pulled up to the curb, trapping it beneath the wheels of the cruiser, then cut the engine. In the sudden silence the tape chattered against the underside of the car.

“We think the same guy who did the two homicides also did this,” Ski said. “Good job you weren’t home, huh?”

Liv didn’t answer. She couldn’t. She had been so desperate to come home to try to make sense of everything, but now that she had finally gotten here, all she found was more chaos and destruction.

Her home was gone.

The white clapboard sides of the building were scorched above every boarded window and the glass that had filled them lay in glittering drifts on the ground. She popped the car door and stepped out into the freezing wind. She could still smell ash and charred wood in the air. Ski got out and joined her on the sidewalk.

“What happened to the Da Costas?” she asked, nodding at the cracked windows on the first floor.

“They’re OK. They were at work when it happened. Fire started around three in the afternoon. The building’s been condemned. Everyone’s staying with family or friends, waiting for the insurance to kick in.”

Another piece of incident tape stretched across a plank of rough plywood that had been nailed in place where her door had been. It also snaked along the fence enclosing the tiny square of garden that had made her want the apartment in the first place.

When she’d moved in, the yard had been covered in concrete stained with oil from the previous owner’s Harley. She’d broken it all up herself, exposing the soil beneath and planting it with native seeds and shrubs, returning it to how it might have looked when man had first settled here. She had often lain on the patch of grass at the center of her tiny garden, staring up at the sky—the ivy strategically blocking the view of one wall, the branches of the cherry tree the other—imagining she was lying in a long-ago forest, far away from her modern-day troubles.

Her apartment had been full of plants too, a remnant of growing up with an organic horticulturalist father who’d taught her to name all the plants at the same time as she’d learned her ABCs. He would have thought it was weird that she’d ended up working as a big-city journalist, living in a concrete jungle when she had the earth in her soul. Maybe it had been her way of rebelling. Maybe she was just nosy. Either way, her apartment, with her plants and her flowers and the rich smell of earth and oxygen, was her sanctuary—her home.

And now someone had taken it all from her. She walked over and pulled some tape away, stepping through a broken gap in the fence and into her ruined garden.

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.