Flashback Read Free Page A

that any way to be neighbourly?” His hands tightened. She would have bruises later. “Surely even you can be nicer than that. Come on, show me how nice you can be, hmn?”
    “Let go of my arms, you bug, or I’ll drop this five pound can of coffee on your foot,” she said, between her teeth, furious at how he was toying with her. He paused deliberately, laughing down at her tight expression, but there must have been some kind of hint in her eyes at how close she was to the edge of her control, for he then stepped back out of her way. He bowed her on past with that same insolent, mocking grin. She just looked at him contemptuously, refusing to show how she’d been shaken, and without another look or word walked right on by.
    She walked on briskly back to the house, smiling occasionally at the different children that shouted and ran around with the wild abandonment that summer vacation invariably brought about. She had just reached the rather long sidewalk to the house when something impelled her to turn around slowly and look behind her.
    A man was standing there some distance away, just watching her, still. She was far enough away so that she should not have been able to see his features very distinctly, but somehow she could. Brown hair, left long at the neck and short on his forehead, fluttered in the breeze and blew across his face. He looked to be in his thirties or thereabouts, and his face was distinguished by two lines running from nose to mouth, carved deeply. Another strong clean line between his brows, sensual lips, and dark eyes completed the face, and she then knew that she was seeing him with her mind and not her eyes. She just stared at him as he stared at her. Then she deliberately turned away and walked quickly to the house.
    So that was their new neighbour, Mr. Raymond, she mused. She’d known almost immediately who he was, and was in fact a bit surprised that if she was that sensitive to him, then why hadn’t she seen him more clearly last night? But then she had been a bit distraught last night, and preoccupied. The vestiges of the nightmare had clung to her mind like an old spiderweb, and she hadn’t been thinking clearly.
    Once inside she quickly and neatly put away the things she’d bought and then, restless and needing some solitude, she ran lightly up the stairs to her room and retrieved her drawing pad and pencils. She would do some sketching today. Her fingers were itching to put something down on paper.
    She called out to her mother as she went out of the back door and then looked around indecisively for a moment. She decided that she would trek over to a favourite resting place of hers. The movement and the solitude, as she headed for the path that would take her towards Mrs. Cessler’s property, helped to ease the tight band of tension that had been holding her in a muscle clenching clamp for the past few days. She was striding through dark blue shadow and bright yellow patches of scattered sunlight as great pine trees loomed overhead. Brown pine needles cushioned the path and covered the ground all around, with lacy light green ferns sprouting in the protecting shade. She wasn’t paying attention to the lush, familiar scenery. She was engrossed in her thoughts, harking back to her ever-present fears, being haunted by that part of herself that set her apart from everyone else.
    The ground angled up, the path leading to higher ground, and she was breathing slightly heavier as she finally broke from the trees and came out in a little clearing that jutted out into a crumbling, rocky cliff that plummeted a good forty feet to uneven, unyielding granite. There were even more pines growing down below. The clearing at the top of the cliff was a good twenty feet in a rough diameter, fairly well secluded and providing an excellent view of the surrounding land. With the attitude of one intimately familiar with both the view and the clearing itself, she threw herself down on the ground underneath a