Sacrificing Virgins Read Free Page A

bed. Her eyes flashed with anxious need, as if it was a matter of life and death that he follow the clue of her ghostly fingers.
    Eric shrugged and decided to play along and move the bed to see what she was pointing at. Absently he reached to the wall to flick the light on, so he could see what he was doing and…
    â€¦in a heartbeat, she was gone.
    â€œYou stupid shit,” he cursed himself out loud. “How could you be such an idiot!” He turned the light off and waited in the empty room for a few minutes, hoping that she would reappear before walking back to the family room and looking outside towards the garden and the willow. He waited, but in his heart, he knew that she was gone for the night. She hadn’t reappeared after the light had taken her the past two times, and so he supposed she wouldn’t this time either.
    Finally, he turned the lights in the house back on, and cleaned up the tea from where he’d spilled it on the carpet. Then he went back to his bedroom and moved the bed away from the wall. Dust bunnies rolled along the back wall, but it was the discolored wood a couple feet away from the wall that he stared at. Part of the reason he’d placed the bed where he had when he’d first moved in was because he’d noticed that spot in the floor. It looked as if someone had cut into the hardwood at some point, pulled out a square, and then replaced it with not-quite-the-same wood. He’d assumed that someone had needed to dig through the floor to fix a utility line at some point in the home’s past, and had ruined the original flooring doing so.
    Now he wasn’t so sure.
    Eric went and got a crowbar from the garage. He slipped the edge in the groove between the new square of flooring and the rest.
    He pushed back on the other end of the tool, and the square shifted. Eric rocked the metal bar just a bit, and then pushed again, and the entire square of five strips of hardwood lifted as one. It clattered to the floor upside down, and he saw the flooring had been nailed together with two other thin boards. It was a doorway into the ground without handle or hinges. And beneath where it had lain, was a dark hole.
    Eric peered inside. Six or eight inches below the flooring, a number of things rested on a small blue-and-green-checked blanket. He lifted them out, one by one, and then pulled the blanket from where it rested on the concrete of his foundation as well.
    Then he sat back and looked more carefully at what he’d found.
    A stack of faded black-and-white photographs, taken in a wide variety of locales. He recognized the Grand Canyon and Times Square amid many other less obvious locations. The common element of them all was a smiling woman with dark eyes and hair. She looked like the kind of girl who laughed easily and hugged hello. She looked a lot like the woman who had pointed to the space beneath his bed.
    Her name was Emma Hodgson. At least that was what he surmised after reading the name on the prescription bottle that he had pulled up with the other things. And when he opened the small leather-bound book titled simply Diary , on the first inside page it read, These are the private thoughts of Emma Hodgson .
    He noted quickly that the slim, loopy handwriting in the diary did not match the jagged script within a small notebook that had also been tucked into the “vault”. The notebook held a man’s writing.
    Eric gathered the books and blanket, the bottle and a necklace and a jewelry box with a ruby ring inside, and took them out to the family room. After setting his bed to right, he began to read the story of Emma and Jerry Hodgson.
    This house is everything I ever dreamed of, Emma had written early in the book. We’re so far from anyone, we could run naked as a jay through the backyard and nobody would ever know. It’s a sanctuary. Jerry’s going to plant some trees so that in a few years we might have some shade; there was nothing but