Seeds of Time by K. C. Dyer Read Free Book Online

class in a black temper, sketching Picasso-like images made up of disjointed body parts.
    Running down to the beach after class felt like a huge relief. To take her mind off the unwanted challenge of the self-portrait, Darrell focused her energy on training Delaney to do a few tricks. She talked thesoft-hearted school cook into buying a large bag of dog food, and every day for that week and the next she ran down to the beach after art to play with Delaney. She crawled into his special tunnel to feed him and fill his water bowl. She sat on the sand with treats in her pocket and taught him to sit and to stay, to roll over and to lie down on command. And every day she would think up a new art project that would allow her to delay working on the self-portrait for one more day.
    Over the next several nights while Kate tapped away at her computer and Lily was blissfully unaware of her own snores, Darrell lay in her bed and wondered about the crab trappers. It was clear they were up to something, though she wasn’t yet sure what it could be. Her encounter with the bullies on the beach had left her feeling disturbed, but the mystery of the situation had a certain appeal. Mystery was one area, along with her art, where Darrell felt she had some expertise.
    For many weeks after her accident, Darrell had lain in bed, feeling as though her heart had shattered and been removed along with her foot. Her beloved father was gone, her foot was gone, and she felt her life was too filled with sadness to look forward to another day. Darrell watched through half-open eyes as her mother,sick with worry, brought in a series of counsellors to try to support her devastated daughter.
    None of the counsellors helped. Nothing helped. Until Darrell’s Uncle Frank remembered his own broken leg.
    Her mother’s brother had been into the hospital many times over the weeks after the accident. Darrell was his only niece, and she knew how his heart bled every time he saw her small, white face on the pillow. After six long weeks of staring at the walls, Darrell looked up one afternoon to see Uncle Frank standing in the doorway with something under his arm.
    He told her the story of his own broken leg, snapped through the femur when he took a header off his bike when he was twelve. He had spent three weeks in traction then, he said, and he fervently believed that a woman named Agatha Christie had saved his life.
    The package under his arm was
Murder on the Orient Express.
Darrell picked it up after he left her room and in an hour she was hooked. Something in the essence of a story that revolved around the death of a man on a famous train swept her away from her own misery. In the end, she read everything that Agatha Christie had ever written, from
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
to
Curtain
. She moved on to Dick Francis, Daphne Du Maurier, and PD James, and she never looked back. Something aboutthe way mysteries were always solved in the books she read appealed to her sense of order.
    Sometime after she turned eleven, Darrell discovered that when she concentrated on drawing, the real world would melt away and she could step into the pictures that poured out of her charcoal pencil as easily as she slipped into the lives of Jane Marple and Adam Dalgliesh. She journeyed into her creativity, preferring it to the real world. Her love of order and her ability to shape the worlds under her pencil pulled her into the stories and drawings that became a more desirable place to live than in the real world with a missing leg and a dead father.
    As she rolled over to sleep, Darrell decided that it was high time she put her expertise toward solving the mystery of the crab trappers on the beach.
    Darrell spent part of the following morning soaking up facts about disease and despair in the Middle Ages. Much of Professor Tooth’s history class reminded her of an Ellis Peters novel, and she relished every moment.
    After lunch, there was half an hour of free time before