DoubleDown V Read Free Page B

the top one out.  The title was written in fancy lettering.  Asian Girls .  The cover was true to the title, showing a teenaged girl from China or somewhere, naked, holding one breast in her hand while smiling at the camera.
    “Jesus, Dad.”
    She smelled a weird odor and frowned.  The magazine had been opened many times, but she doubted he’d read much of the text.
    “Bet it’s old.  Before he met Mom.”
    She snapped the magazine shut and searched for a date, disappointed to find it was only two years old.
    The magazines below the top one were older issues of the same publication.  All of them had a naked Asian girl on the cover, and inside all were more explicit, showing girls having sex with other girls or masturbating with vibrators.  Karen didn’t want to keep looking but she couldn’t seem to stop herself.  Some part of her wanted to understand why her dad would want these things, but another part of her was … well, just interested.
    Finally she forced herself to stop looking and put the magazines back in the box, shoving it back on the top shelf in the closet.
    Part of her was tempted to leave the box where her mom would find it, but Dad would surely figure out it was Karen who’d moved it and there’d be hell to pay.
    I guess your secret has to be safe.  At least for today.
    There was one more box.  She opened it and studied the contents.
    “Oh my God … .”
    Karen looked at the items in the box for ten minutes before replacing it.
    She’d never look at her father the same way again.
     
    *   *   *
     
    Karen left her father’s secret hideaway and walked out of the house.  She didn’t feel the calling yet, so she went out to wander around her neighborhood.
    The silence that surrounded her when time stopped was like nothing she ever felt when the clocks ticked normally.  Sometimes she’d wake up in the middle of the night and have to go to the bathroom.  The house would be quiet, but there was a type of white noise that permeated any place in southern California.  She couldn’t exactly hear anything, and anybody else would say it was deathly quiet, but the true quiet, the quiet that resulted from absolutely no movement whatsoever, was so very different.  It always creeped her out, and she never got used to it.
    Her footsteps made no noise.
    If she crinkled a piece of paper in her hand, it was like crunching the softest toilet paper.
    Once she used a fireplace poker to smash a window.  The poker slid through the glass but not a whisper of a sound came out.  She knew that once time started again, the window would shatter and crash, but she had no intention of being anywhere nearby when that happened.
    The only sound she’d ever heard in her secret time was when she’d talked to Bobby, and a back part of her mind wondered how that had been possible; no answer was forthcoming.
    She walked through the deathly silence and then suddenly stopped.
    She’d just found out her father’s deepest secret, a secret that she never imagined he could have buried inside him.
    What secrets do other people have?
    Mrs. Montgomery, her next door neighbor sat on the rickety old glider on her front porch, perched like she was about to row a boat.  She and Mr. Montgomery were old, in their forties, and they were known as the happiest people on the block. They always had ridiculously happy smiles pasted on their faces.  Karen hoped she’d be that happy when she was old like them.
    She walked into their home and looked around.  She’d been there a couple times with her mom, but that’d been years ago.  The house was immaculate, as if the Pope were due for a visit.  Karen looked around but didn’t find much of interest until she snuck into the master bedroom and found Mrs. Montgomery’s diary in her bedside table, hidden beneath several pairs of rainbow-striped socks.  She turned to the most recent entry, dated the day before.
     
    The asshole can just eat cold fucking pork chops as far as I’m