Intimate Whispers by Dee Carney Read Free Book Online Page A

Teddy? Suddenly eating the sandwich he brought over no longer seemed like such a good idea. It bubbled in his stomach like battery acid.
    “Where should I begin?”
    She shot him another bland look. He’d all but anticipated it. “At the beginning.”
    “Um, I guess we had a typical childhood.” Sabrina settled onto the stool now and gave him a cursory nod. “You know, two brothers sharing a single room. We fought a lot, played a lot. Fought more. Everything was good, so I thought. So my parents thought.”
    “Something changed.”
    “Yeah. We grew up.” After leaving Sabrina last night, he went home with the document of words meant to give him some insight, or some kind of connection to his brother and spent hours poring over the words, trying to make sense of them. He couldn’t have gotten more than three or four hours of sleep as a result and suddenly, he felt every second of those missing minutes of rest. “Thad stopped being the brother I knew. He became listless, some days not even having the motivation to get out of bed and shower. He’d just flunked a semester at school, so we all figured it was just a funk he’d get over sooner or later. But he never did.”
    “What was he like before that? This change couldn’t have happened overnight.” A furrow etched into his brow as he mulled it over. “Actually, you’re right. If I really spend time studying his behavior, he was always a sullen kid. Always brooding over something. Definitely a glass-half-empty kind of person. But then it got bad. So much worse.” His voice took on the same melancholic tone it always got when he talked about Teddy, but it couldn’t be helped. He hated to think of his role in his brother’s downward spiral. “We tried to insist he get help, but you can’t force an adult to do anything he doesn’t want to do and Thad didn’t think he needed help. He just wanted to sleep and be left alone. Only his boat and the ocean ever got him to leave his room.”
    The stool scraped against the tile floor when she shifted, causing him to look up.
    Her expression said she understood his sorrow and her silence was just as telling. If 29

    Dee Carney
    nothing else, it prompted him to speak more about his most haunting topic. It came pouring out of him as if he’d spent the night drinking liquor, effectively loosening his tongue. He almost never spoke with his friends about Teddy, yet here he was with a stranger pouring out his heart. Later, maybe when he wasn’t so desperate, he’d analyze why.
    “We don’t know he’s dead for certain.”
    “What?” Sabrina shot forward. “But…”
    “If there isn’t a body to recover, you have to wait seven years to be officially declared dead. It’s only been two.”
    “So why would you even assume he’s dead? What happened?”
    “He went out on his boat one day and never came back.”
    “That doesn’t mean he’s dead, Jason.”
    His eyes felt heavy. The effort to lift them and meet her gaze sapped his depleting energy. “It does if his boat is found in the middle of the Intercoastal. No sign of him anywhere to be found.”
    Sabrina’s fingers had been drumming along the bar top. They stopped the moment the words left his mouth. With a glance he realized their hands were only inches from grazing. He battled some urge to slip her hand in his and hold on to it for a little comfort.
    She peered at the page again, disrupting the raging thought. “That, by itself, is still not a whole lot of proof. And the fact you didn’t get any messages from him when he had a clear medium for accessing you still gives me reason to pause. I’m not trying to belittle what you’re thinking, but Jason, are you sure you’re not wrong?”
    “You told me you speak with the dead. Is that true or not?”
    “It’s true.”
    “Then my brother is dead, because somehow you gave me a message from him.” Her voice remained neutral, but a shield slipped down over her eyes, separating him from her. “What