Riptide by Michael Prescott Read Free Book Online Page A

okay?”
    “Yes, he’s...fine.” As fine as he ever was.
    “See, I’m learning more about you every day.”
    “I’m endlessly fascinating.”
    “You are,” he said over a crackle of radio crosstalk. “You’re an exotic riddle, like the Sphinx. A woman of mystery and intrigue —”
    “Enough with the compliments.”
    “It’s never enough. Just give me time. I’ll wear you down, Silence.”
    “Don’t count on it, Wilkes.”
    “You know you want me. You’re just making me work for it.”
    “Self-delusion is a terrible thing.”
    “You should know. So you’re sure there was no damage to your place? Did you check everywhere?”
    “I checked.” She decided she had to tell someone and it might as well be him. “Part of my cellar wall crumbled. And you’re not going to believe what I found.”
    “I’ve been wearing a uniform for eight years. There’s nothing I haven’t seen or won’t believe.”
    She told him. When she was through, there was a brief silence on his end.
    “Shit,” he said finally.
    Childishly she was pleased to get a reaction out of him. “Is that your professional opinion?”
    “How the hell did they get there?”
    “Maybe it’s some kind of family crypt from way back when.”
    “I’m coming over.”
    “It’s not necessary.”
    “I think it is. See you in five.”
    “Really, I —”
    Dead phone.
    It was nice of him to worry, she guessed. But she wished he wouldn’t.
    With a dustpan she swept up the mess under the fireplace. Shards from the decorative jars were intermingled with the sea glass. She would have to sift through the fragments later. It was easy enough to tell them apart. Sea glass developed a frosted patina of minute crystalline formations. What began as a fragment of an ordinary bottle underwent a magical transformation into a gem. A sea change.
    Next she tackled the family photos on the stairs. Most of the glass plates had cracked, but the frames were undamaged. She gathered up the pictures, stacking them neatly. It was funny how rarely she noticed these photographs, though she passed them several times each day. There were shots of her mother on Santa Monica Pier and at a picnic in the Angeles National Forest. She had been a small woman, like Jennifer herself, with the same fragile doll-like quality, but without the assertiveness to compensate for it.
    And there was her father, a harried, rumpled man in a loose-fitting suit, his gaze far away.
    She had just one memory of her father. She couldn’t even be certain it was a real memory, and not some trick of the mind. She saw herself as a very little girl, riding the carousel on Santa Monica Pier in her father’s lap. The horses whirled, and she was laughing, her father’s strong arms around her waist, holding her tight.
    She didn’t want to think about her father. Yet she couldn’t help it. He was so much a part of her life, this man she’d barely known.
    Aldrich Silence graduated from USC’s School of Medicine near the top of his class. Though he could have had his pick of lucrative positions, he chose to open a small private practice in Venice. Most of his patients were uninsured, impoverished, or actually homeless. He didn’t make a lot of money. He didn’t care.
    He met Marjorie Taylor on a blind date arranged by friends. Unlike other women he’d met, Marjorie didn’t try to convince him to better himself by moving to Beverly Hills. She didn’t think he needed to better himself. She liked him the way he was.
    They were married in a hippie style ceremony on the beach. Jennifer was born four years later. By then Aldrich’s practice had begun to fail. The problem wasn’t his uninsured patients. It was Aldrich himself.
    He’d started to act “funny,” as Jennifer’s mother would always put it, around the time he turned twenty-six. This was fairly late for the onset of schizophrenia, and the symptoms weren’t correctly diagnosed until they were unmistakable.
    In the early years of the illness,