Because I'm Watching by Christina Dodd Read Free Book Online

his name—the lady at the title company, the kid who delivered his groceries—and word had spread. Probably not to everyone, but to the nosy people and the people who wanted to use him to make themselves look good. Like Wodzicki the insurance creep.
    Going to the sink, Jacob got a drink of water, then looked in the refrigerator. The lemon sitting on the shelf had been here since he moved in, and it was as wrinkled as Uncle Decker’s face. He opened the freezer to find a package of thawing peas.
    He hated peas. He took them out, tore the end off the box, and shook a handful into his palm. One by one he flung the shriveled green knobs down his throat. When he couldn’t gag down any more, he tossed the package at the garbage and walked toward the exposed front of his house.
    Someone had put a piece of plywood over the hole in the floor and tried to wipe up the oil. Half of his porch roof had been splattered across his yard, leaving the other side hanging at a jaunty half wink. His front door had somehow come to rest on the hydrangea. His mother would cry at the damage to the bush.
    His street, Dogwood Blossom Street, was nothing but a stub; ten houses on one side, nine on the other, starting on the intersection of Elm Street and ending in a battered guardrail that protected cars from an accidental plunge off the cliff and into the ocean. A wooden sign in the corner yard proclaimed this was the Dogwood Blossom Historical Neighborhood. When Jacob had first come to look at this house, he had thought that the sign was vain and stupid. But he thought pretty much everything was stupid, so no surprise there.
    At the house across the street, every window was covered by pale yellow blinds, yet even so late at night, light glowed, defying the night.
    Maddie Hewitson’s house. He’d hate to pay her electric bill.
    He inched forward, staring, tripped on a chunk of broken ceiling plaster, and barely caught himself before he went headlong across his threshold and into the broken pit of his porch.
    He ought to keep going. He ought to make his way through the scattered boards, walk down to the end of the street, over the cliff, and into oblivion.
    He ought to. But like he said—a coward.
    He turned back to his living room, to the upright wooden chair where he sat and suffered and waited for courage.
    But his chair was smashed to splinters, crushed beneath an ancient steamer trunk that had fallen through the crumpled ceiling. When the hell had that happened?… Sometime after he left the scene, he would guess.
    If he had stayed, that trunk would have killed him for sure.
    â€œSon of a bitch!” Death kept missing him by minutes and inches. He had the worst luck of any man he’d ever known.
    Well. Some of his kids would disagree with him. The ones who were dead. The ones who lived with pain and mutilation …
    He squatted, bent his head, held his belly, writhed as he rode out the memories.
    A car drove by on Elm Street. A car. People might see him.
    He lifted his head. He crawled to the recliner, knocked the worst of the rubble off the seat, and dragged his butt onto the sagging cushion. The whole thing smelled like dust and funky old lady; the former owner must have slept in it, too, and maybe died in it. He looked at the ceiling and wondered if the old lady had stored any more heavy trunks up there that would blast through the weakened rafters to crush him. But no—the plaster was gone overhead and he could see all the way through to the cracks in the damaged roof.
    Madeline Hewitson had even screwed up his roof. He’d bet Wodzicki’s wallet would shriek when it heard about that.
    The old Jacob would have felt guilty for making Maddie handle Wodzicki alone. But she’d brought it on herself, and besides, he didn’t have room for one more scrap of guilt. His soul was already booked up. When he thought of what had been done to him, and what he had done …
    The pain came,