Drawn Into Darkness Read Free Page B

competed with babble from Dish TV. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I looked around the room and saw its personality as being a bit anal, with sofa, lounge chair, end tables, and lamps arranged with rectilinear precision and spotlessly clean.
    I heard Uncle Steve approaching, but saw him only as a silhouette against window light from the back door, quick and slim.
    â€œHave a seat.” The teenage boy gestured me toward one end of the impeccable sofa. The carpet, too, I saw, was innocent of dirt in any form. Yet nothing looked new, and nobody had decorated. No throw pillows, no color scheme, and nothing worth noticing hanging on the walls. All the essentials were in evidence, yet the place felt oddly incomplete, as if it were a motel room, as if nobody lived here.
    And the man hurrying in gave every impression of being exactly that: nobody. Not very tall and not well built, narrow-shouldered and hollow-chested and stooping, he was a gray man, by which I mean more than the color of his goatee and his thin hair pulled back into an aging-hippie ponytail and maybe his pebble eyes set too close together, shrinking into his cork-colored face like a turtle into its shell. Pinched, beak-nosed, and weaselly, he looked like the result of centuries of inbreeding. “Steven Stoat,” he said tonelessly, standing over me as I perched on his sofa but not offering his hand. “And you are?”
    â€œUm, Liana Clymer.” I wasn’t legally, not yet, but I was using my birth name. The cutesy-poo alliteration of my married name, Liana Leppo, had always annoyed me.
    â€œShe lives in the pink house, Uncle Steve.” The kid sat down on the opposite end of the sofa from me, where he could watch TV.
    â€œI just moved in last week, so I thought I’d introduce myself. Actually, I came looking for somebody to talk with. Another woman,” I added quickly so he wouldn’t get the wrong idea. I really had assumed there would be a woman in the house, a wife or a girlfriend. But if there were, the place would have had the pillows and tchotchkes it lacked. I couldn’t imagine any woman living here and not wanting to pretty the place up. “But there isn’t any, is there?”
    The man’s inhospitable scrutiny had begun to irk me. Having asked a direct question, I made myself wait for an answer.
    He backed off and sat down in an armchair, but he didn’t say a word.
    I tried again. “Is your name Steven with a
v
or with a
ph
?”
    Even though he did not actually roll his eyes, something in his silent stare made me feel as if he had.
    â€œAre you the one who keeps this house so neat and tidy?”
    Nothing. Not even a frown.
    Screw him. I would get out of here soon, but I would stay long enough to show him that he didn’t faze me. I turned my attention to Justin. “What’s that on your T-shirt?” Like me and also like his uncle, he wore a tee with something printed on the front. Mine said, “Bad Spellers of the Wrold, Untie.”
    Justin readily turned his attention away from the TV to answer me. “It’s supposed to be a dolphin.” He had a pleasant, husky voice, not quite a child’s voice yet far from being a rebellious weird-haired teen’s. “But it got kind of messed up, see?” Turning toward me, he tugged the tee straight, stretching it like a canvas.
    I would not have been able to tell that the broken, smeared image was a dolphin. “I see,” I said. “Dolphin by Picasso.”
    Justin laughed, and his grin seemed to light up the dim room. “Dolphin by jammed screen print machine,” he said. “Uncle Steve works at this business that makes T-shirts for tourists, and he brings home the ones that get screwed up.”
    â€œThat’s nice. Unless he screws them up on purpose,” I added, trying for another laugh.
    â€œNo, he’d never do that,” Justin said quickly, no smile, his voice stressed.