Riptide Read Free Page B

head, she saw her reflection in the mirror, a pale ghost image framed in wheat-colored hair. In January she’d turned thirty, but she looked younger. She had a child’s face with a child’s large eyes. She expended a lot of energy making people treat her as a grownup. Maybe that was one reason she wouldn't walk away from her job.
    Leaving the bathroom, she deposited the photocopied threat message in her study, a small businesslike room overlooking a backyard garden in need of tending. There had been a tool shed in the backyard once, many years ago. Her mother had removed it and planted flowers on the ground where it stood. She tended those flowers until the day she died.
    Jennifer had grown up in this house and knew every squeaky floorboard. It was a Queen Anne Victorian, tall and narrow, two stories of cedar oak shingles and gingerbread trim topped by a high gable and slanted roof. The house was planted on a narrow lot edged by a tangle of sweet pea vines and a low hedge resembling a hunk of moldy cheese.
    The House of Silence. That was how she had always thought of it, because of the long, tense silences of her childhood.
    It had gone up in 1908, at the start of Venice’s prosperity. After a long decline, the district had now entered a new, affluent phase, in which old homes were purchased as seven-figure teardowns. Real estate developers were constantly after her, but she refused to sell. The house had been built by her great-grandfather and handed down through the generations. With her parents dead, it was her last link to her family.
    Besides Richard, of course.
    She wondered how much longer she could hold out. The cost of living was rising, and her income wasn’t keeping up. She would stay as long as she could, and not just out of family loyalty. She loved the sea, the wet breeze and misty mornings, the cheerful chaos of the Venice boardwalk, and she loved the old house for its faded, funky charm, its narrow hallways and strange angles.
    Upstairs she stripped, then stood in the shower and ran the water hot until the old pipes were banging. Steam rose, white and scalding. The water cascaded over her, burning the last traces of the crime scene off her body.
    The hot water ran out abruptly, replaced by a chilly downpour. Damn water heater.
    She toweled her hair dry in the bedroom. The high stained glass windows over her bed gave the room an aura of sanctity that was somewhat offset by the montage of erotic 1920s postcards on the wall.
    From her closet she grabbed a pair of baggy woolen pajama bottoms she wore as pants, and a peach blouse two sizes too big. Like every shirt she owned, the blouse had long sleeves that concealed the four-inch rope of scar tissue on her left forearm.
    As she reached the bottom of the stairs, she heard raucous barking from across the street. The nasty Rottweiler owned by her newest neighbors, penned in a side yard.
    She glanced out the front window and saw the dog at the gate, gnashing its teeth. A few yards away, a child no older than five was approaching cautiously, but not cautiously enough.
    Then she was out the door, sprinting barefoot across the street.
    The kid—a boy, she could see that now—waggled his fingers at the dog in a friendly greeting. The Rottweiler retreated a couple of steps and stopped barking, but Jennifer knew this was only a feint, a ruse to disarm the victim.
    The boy extended one hand to pet the doggie. He had just begun to insert his hand between the wrought-iron twinings of the gate when Jennifer reached him. She yanked him back, and the Rottweiler, cheated of its prey, launched itself at the gate, barking and snapping ferociously.
    The gate shook under the dog’s weight as the fanged head thrust between the bars, white teeth gleaming.
    The boy started to cry.
    Jennifer held him. “It’s okay. It’s okay, it’s okay.”
    When the boy was calm, she knelt by him and asked if his mommy or daddy was around. Mutely he pointed to the house.
    She took him by the