Broken Pieces by Carla Cassidy Read Free Book Online Page B

already paid and sermons previously delivered filled the drawers. She threw most of it into a plastic bag, but kept the records of the most recent utility bills that had been paid.
    It was after nine when she decided to call it a night. It had been a long day and she was exhausted. She rose from the desk and stretched with her arms overhead, trying to work out the kinks that had tightened her muscles. She wasn’t used to the kind of physical work she’d done that day.
    As a third-grade teacher, the most physical thingshe did was occasionally run a footrace with a student on the playground during recess.
    She turned off the desk lamp, then glanced toward the window into the face of a man standing outside in the darkness staring back at her.

Chapter 5
    S he kept her scream trapped inside, not wanting to frighten Kelsey. The man was there only a moment, then gone. Mariah remained in the darkness of the office, frozen in place.
    Move, a voice screamed inside her head. There was no phone in the office and her cell phone was in her purse in the kitchen. Call somebody. Get help!
    She hadn’t recognized the man. What had he been doing peeking in her window? Who was he? Questions crashed inside her head as she backed out of the office.
    Had she locked the front and back doors? She couldn’t remember. She ran into the kitchen and checked the door. Locked. She grabbed her cell phone and was about to dial for help when a knock sounded on the front door.
    Once again she froze, fingers poised to dial. Would somebody who wanted to harm them knock on the front door? There were a dozen windows open in the house. If he wanted to hurt them, he could have just waited until the middle of the night, slit a screen and crept inside.
    She moved to the front door, turned on the porch light and then shouted through the locked door. “What do you want?”
    “Finn sent me. Said you had some work. Name’s Joel Clarkson.”
    Relief flooded through her. Her fingers relaxed around her phone and she cracked open the door a couple of inches.
    “Didn’t mean to scare you none,” he said. “I knocked and nobody answered. I saw the light on and figured I’d look in to see if anyone was around.” Dark hair hung lank around his face, emphasizing hollow, acne-scarred cheeks. He looked thin, but with wiry strength.
    “Mr. Clarkson, it’s a little late to discuss anything tonight. If you want to come back in the morning, we can talk then.”
    He backed away from the door with an apologetic shake of his head. “Sorry, I should have realized it was too late. I’ll be back in the morning.” He didn’t wait for her reply, but headed for a rusty black pickup truck parked in front of the house.
    She watched until his headlights disappeared down the long, dark driveway; then she closed the door and locked it once again.
    Until this moment she hadn’t realized how vulnerable she and Kelsey were in this house. Without air-conditioning she’d gone to bed the night before with windows open wide, providing a perfect entrance to anyone who might want to get inside.
    She now went around the lower level, closing and locking the windows tight. They could sleep with the upstairs windows open and if necessary she would invest in a couple of fans. Installing central air wasan expense she didn’t even want to consider for a house she wasn’t going to live in.
    With everything secure downstairs, she climbed to the second floor, her heart still racing faster than normal. For a moment as she’d stared at that face at the window, she’d thought
he’d
come back for her.
    As she stood beneath a hot shower, her thoughts once again raced back in time, back to the night of her rape. She’d always wondered if she’d been raped by a transient passing through town or if it had been somebody she knew, somebody who lived in Plains Point.
    There was some comfort in clinging to the belief that it had been a stranger, that it couldn’t have been any of the locals who knew