What Dread Hand by Jennifer Skogen

Author:Jennifer Skogen
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: EPIC Press
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Richard was gone when Lorna woke the next morning. She scanned her bed for a trace of him—some sign that she had actually spent the night with the astonishing Richard Grey—but didn’t find so much as a silver hair on her grandmother’s quilt.

When she pushed herself up from the bed, Lorna winced at a sudden pain. On the underside of her wrist was a thin line of dried blood. It wasn’t a deep cut, but it stung when she pressed her finger to it. Lorna couldn’t remember cutting herself last night, but things had gotten a little rough, so she supposed anything was possible.

A wave of emotion that was somewhere between smugness and deep embarrassment washed through Lorna. She would see him today, and the next day, and the next. Had it been a mistake after all? Yes. Probably. Maybe.

It was only five a.m. There was an abundance of time before school started. Lorna knew she wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep, so she started some coffee. While she watched it drip, she let herself remember his hands on her legs and how his teeth had grazed her neck.

When she went to get a coffee mug out of the cupboard, Lorna glanced at the cookie jar—her grandfather’s makeshift urn—where it still sat on the kitchen counter. She really should have done something about that already. What would she have said if Richard had tried to open it the night before looking for an actual cookie? Probably just told him the whole story, she supposed, minus the part about carrying a piece of her grandfather to school on Monday.

Lorna still wasn’t sure what had possessed her to put the small piece of bone in her pocket. Was this just the first of even more eccentric things she would do, now that she was a thirty-something woman who had moved back to her childhood home? Furthermore, at what age were you no longer considered an independent woman and relegated to spinsterhood? Lorna was afraid she had already passed that year.

As she stared at the cookie jar, waiting for the coffee to finish brewing, Lorna noticed a large smudge of what must have been ash on the side. Lorna walked over and leaned in close. The smudge curved around the body of the jar like a rather large thumbprint. She clearly remembered wiping down the jar after she first cleaned up the horrible mess of ash.

The only time she had opened the lid since had been to drop the fragment of her grandfather’s wayward bone shard inside. Even then, she had not touched the ash. At least, she didn’t think she had . . . could she really have walked around with traces of her grandfather on her hands and not known it? Lorna made a little choking sound that was something between a gag and a gasp and held her hands out in front of her. Perfectly clean.

She really needed to give the whole house another scouring before she had any more guests over.

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