Dreams of Shreds and Tatters by Amanda Downum Read Free Book Online Page B

as she caught up. Alex only shook his head. “The storm shutters weren’t closed,” she continued. “Someone might have been here.”
    Finally, when they climbed the steps and stood in front of the door, the pain in her head eased and her eyes stopped blurring. From Alex’s rasping sigh, he felt it too. The front door was locked, much too secure for a credit card. But with so many broken windows that was hardly a problem.
    Liz circled the house, ignoring Alex’s strained, “Be careful.”
    “Help me up,” she said, clearing shards of glass from a windowsill on the far side. “What?” she said when his eyebrows rose. “You’re the one who started this.”
    He sighed. “In for a penny...”
    In for two to ten. She decided not to say that out loud.
    He knelt, and Liz stepped into his cupped hands, trying to ignore his grunt as he took her weight. He boosted her until she had a grip on the inside frame and could haul herself over the ledge. She grabbed his arm and pulled as he scrambled in after her.
    They had crawled into a bedroom. The curtain rod hung askew, ripped half free of the wall, and pale light slanted across a neatly made bed. A lamp lay broken on the floor beside the nightstand. Through the cold she smelled damp and insidious mildew.
    The whistle of Alex’s breath stopped her as she started to leave the room. He sank to the floor, face slick and pale, and tugged the scarf away from his throat while he fumbled in his coat pocket for his inhaler. His hands trembled as he took a hit.
    Liz dropped to her knees beside him, her chest tightening in sympathy. “Are you all right?”
    He nodded, sucking in a long breath. “I will be,” he said on the exhalation. His breath was bittersweet with chemicals. “So much for my career as a cat burglar.” He smiled, but the corners of his mouth pinched white.
    “Are you sure?” His glasses slid down his long nose, and her reflection floated in the striated blue of his irises.
    “Yes. Just let me rest a moment.” The lingering wheeze in his breath wasn’t convincing. He lowered his head, dusty blond hair drifting around his face. “Go on. I’ll catch up. I mean it,” he said when she hesitated. “I’ll be fine.”
    She frowned, but finally stood. It was no use trying to fuss over him; he’d never admit to all the pain. She’d appreciated his cool reserve when they first met—a grounding counterpoint to her own nerves and dread—but sometimes she wanted to tear down his walls with a sledgehammer, if that was what it took to get an unqualified answer from him.
    Instead she opened the closet door, but found nothing but spare blankets and a bland print of loons on the water that might have come with the cabin. The bedroom door opened into a dim hallway; the opposite room was just as empty.
    What had she expected to find? A bloody coat? A body in the closet? Yeah, me and Nancy Drew .
    The hall led to the living room, where a sliding glass door lay in shining fragments across the floor, Venetian blinds ripped apart and scattered. Beyond the jagged doorframe was the broken remnant of a deck. An easel leaned against the far wall, its wooden legs warped out of true—Liz’s pulse sped at the sight.
    Despite the breeze rattling the torn blinds, the room held a strange, layered smell. Damp and salt, but also something raw and metallic, a hint of animal musk, a sharp chemical stink like turpentine. Liz shook her head against a sneeze and the miasma faded, until she wasn’t sure if she’d only imagined it. Beneath the weight of coat and sweater, her skin crawled.
    “Find anything yet, Watson?” Alex asked, pausing in the doorway.
    “I’d rather be Nancy Drew,” she said, clinging to jokes to hold her unease at bay. “Does that make you Bess or George?”
    “Either is better than Ned. At least Watson had a gun.”
    “Actually—” Even forced humor died as she stared at the floor by her feet. “I think I may have found something.”
    Red-brown stains