Undying Read Free

doors at night or close her windows.
    A death wish?
    Macy studied the magnolia tree in her front yard. Her mother had always liked magnolias.
    There had been a branch of magnolia blossoms on her mother’s white coffin. No lilies or gardenias or the usual funeral flowers. Only magnolias.
    Daisies on Mariah’s.
    Peonies on little Minnie’s.
    No flowers on her father’s coffin. He hadn’t been a flower kind of guy.
    Macy walked away from the window that had never had the drapes pulled on it since she rented the cottage outside Charlottesville, Virginia, more than a year ago. She had nothing to hide. Her soul had been bared to the bitter world a long time ago.
    She walked barefoot, in nothing but a pair of panties and a men’s ribbed sleeveless T-shirt, through the dark house. It was only June but June was hot in Virginia.
    The rooms were quiet except for the sound of her footsteps. She had no cat or dog to keep her company. She hadn’t had a pet since she was fourteen.
    Fritz had been sent to the pound. No one ever knew what happened to Snowcap, her sister’s white Persian cat. Lost in the confusion of the police cars and emergency vehicles, Macy supposed.
    Macy exhaled, fighting the dark cloud settling over her. As much as she hated herself for it, she couldn’t stop thinking about Teddy.
    She guessed he was thinking about her. That was why she couldn’t sleep. There was this crazy, weird connection between them. Had been for as long as she could remember. And she couldn’t escape it. It was like cancer, a cavernous, black hole eating her from the inside out.
    She wandered through the living room into the office. When she had rented the home, the landlady had said the cozy room would make an excellent spare bedroom for family or friends. Macy had no family left. No friends.
    The Apple logo on her open laptop glowed, but the room was as dark as the others in the house. The open window as naked.
    From here, she could hear an owl hooting.
    She sat down in her chair and flipped on the lamp. Soft light glowed in a circle on the old oak desk she had found at a yard sale. She hadn’t bothered to refinish it, just removed the center drawer and added a keyboard drawer. When she was here at the cottage, which wasn’t all that frequently, she liked to use a full keyboard, sometimes even an additional monitor connected to her laptop. It gave her a better sense of proportions in the pictures she shot.
    She touched the drawer and it glided out. She tapped the mouse beside the wireless keyboard and the laptop screen lit up. She had an instant message.
    He had been waiting for her.
    Her stomach tightened. He always seemed to know when she was awake in the middle of the night. Worse, she knew when he was.
    You there?
    The cursor pulsed.
    She could feel him waiting.
    She glanced at the dark window. He said he watched her. She had never known if he meant literally. Was tonight the night he was out there? Would tonight be the night he took her life and ended the last fourteen years of agonized waiting?
    She looked back at the laptop screen.
    Maybe tonight would be the night she took a stand. Maybe tonight she would ignore him. Maybe she’d even threaten that if he contacted her again, she would call the police.
    It was an empty threat, of course. It would be nearly impossible to track him to a computer, to a location. He traveled for his work, too. He IM’d from Internet cafés, hotel business offices. Even truck stops had Internet access for their customers now. And when he contacted her from home, he said he used different laptops that he bought and sold regularly on the Internet. The stark truth was that even if she could convince the FBI that he was the nutcase they were looking for, it would be nearly impossible for them to track him down through his Internet use. The police would never find him. He knew it. She knew it.
    The curser pulsed. Marceline? Teddy probed.
    He always called her by her given name, as her father had. When