Nightshade

Nightshade Read Free Page B

Book: Nightshade Read Free
Author: John Saul
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yellowing of the fraying fabric.
    She closed the drawer and let her eyes sweep over the room one last time.
    All was as it should be, exactly as Cynthia had left it.
    Emily left the room then and headed toward the sewing room, but as she passed the top of the stairs, an acrid odor filled her nostrils.
    Smoke?
    She frowned, trying to remember if she’d lit the fire that morning.
    She couldn’t remember.
    If fact, she wasn’t quite sure she’d even been downstairs that morning.
    Clutching the banister, she started down the steep flight.
    The odor grew stronger as she came to the foot of the stairs, but when she peered into the parlor, the fireplace was dark.
    But she was certain she smelled smoke!
    The kitchen?
    Why would there be smoke in the kitchen? She’d just come downstairs, hadn’t she?
    She moved toward the kitchen, pushed open the door that separated it from the dining room. She saw it: flames boiling up from a skillet someone had left on the stove. More flames consuming the curtains around the window and charring the wood of the cupboards.
    Hurrying across to the stove, Emily picked up the frying pan and started toward the sink, but the skillet slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor. The burning oil quickly spread across the linoleum, and an instant later the floor was covered with a sheet of fire.
    Emily stared at the flames in frozen horror for a moment, then turned and fled from the kitchen. “Cynthia!” she called out. “The house is on fire! Hurry!”
    Moving as quickly as her old legs would carry her, Emily made her way to the front door, pulled it opened, and lurched out onto the front porch.
    From the other side of the fence that separated her yard from the one next door, an elderly man — whom Emily was certain she’d never seen before — looked at her worriedly.
    “Emily?” asked Ralph Gunderson, who had lived next door to Emily for nearly thirty years. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
    “Fire,” Emily managed to say, looking back at her house. “Someone set my house on fire!”
    As Ralph Gunderson’s gaze followed Emily’s the first tongues of flame flicked out the kitchen window. Feeding voraciously on the wind, the fire began climbing the dried wooden siding of Emily’s old frame house.
    *                                     *                                     *
    MATT MOORE CROUCHED at the scrimmage line, his eyes looking straight through the boy opposite him, knowing his refusal even to acknowledge his opponent’s presence was already undermining Eric Holmes’s confidence. It was a trick he’d been using on Eric since they’d first started playing football in fourth grade, and even eight years later Eric hadn’t figured out exactly what it was that made Matt’s movements so hard to predict. Matt’s body tensed as he listened to the quarterback call the signal to the center, and the second the ball was snapped, he sprang into action, feinting to the left then reversing to the right so quickly and smoothly that Eric, already rattled by Matt’s patented blank stare, had thrown himself off balance and was unable to throw a block that might knock Matt off stride. Matt streaked downfield toward the goal line, faked right and went left, then spun around as he crossed into the end zone and reached up, his hands closing on the ball, which seemed to have been placed there by some kind of magic.
    Except there was no magic involved.
    Rather, it was nothing more than Pete Arneson playing his role with the same precision that Matt had performed his own maneuvers. Though neither Pete nor Matt had so much as glanced at each other during the play, the quarterback had trusted Matt to be at the right position at the right moment.
    A moment, both of them knew, that was absolutely predetermined by the silent counting they had perfected over the years they’d been playing together. They’d started counting together

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