The Unquiet past by Kelley Armstrong

Author:Kelley Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUV067000, JUV058000, JUV013050
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Published: 2015-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

Tess took an old blanket and settled into the large pantry. An odd place to pick as a bedroom, but Jackson insisted.

“There aren’t any windows here,” he said.

“Which means it’ll be too dark.”

“The moon will shine in through the doorway, and I’ll give you the flashlight.”

She looked around the pantry. “Why here?”

“Because there aren’t any windows.” Impatience edged into his voice, clearly frustrated by her inability to see what seemed obvious to him. After a moment of silence, he said, “No one can see you’re in here alone.”

“Who would see me?”

He didn’t answer, as if again waiting for her to jump to the right conclusion. This time she did.

“Steve? The man who chased me? You don’t think he’d find me up here—”

“Are you going to take that chance?”

He was right, and she conceded it with a nod. “I’ll stay in here.”

“I would give you my switchblade, but you don’t know how to use one, and that makes it more dangerous. It can be taken and turned against you.”

“All right.”

“If you’re going to be out in the world on your own, you should have a weapon though. You just need to learn how to use it first.”

“All right.”

He started to leave then, but stopped and turned. “We have to do something about Etienne. At the very least, inform the police.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You’d rather let him go after another girl? Give it some thought. We’ll talk in the morning.”

Tess knew she should give it thought—but as soon as he left and she lay down, other thoughts consumed her. Ones of the house. Of the small rooms. Of the boxes.

She listened to Jackson in the other room as he settled into his blankets. He tossed and turned for a few minutes, but the day’s work had taken its toll, and soon the swish and thump of his movements stopped and deep breathing took their place.

Tess glanced toward the basement door. The answers were down there, and now that he’d drifted off, she was free to get them in her own way.

Her own way.

She rubbed the goose bumps rising on her arms. Her own way did not mean searching for a clue they’d missed. It meant searching for the clues Jackson couldn’t see. Ghosts. Visions.

Is that what she thought they were now? Ghosts and visions? Not madness?

Tess didn’t know. She’d heard someone last night, speaking French, crying for help. Then they’d discovered that the house seemed to have been used for mental patients. That there were rooms like the ones in her nightmares. Boxes like the ones in her nightmares.

Nightmares? Or memories?

Or hallucinations? Signs that she belonged in a place like this. That she was crazy.

There was a way to answer that, wasn’t there? Go downstairs. See what happened. If she saw something, she could investigate and get two kinds of answers from it—one that told her what had happened in this house and one that told her she wasn’t crazy. Or she could investigate, find nothing and get the answer she dreaded—that she was crazy.

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