Running Scared by Lisa Jackson Read Free Book Online Page B

a mistake in your checkbook. Danger is different. It usually means life-threatening or incredible pain or…”
    “I meant trouble, okay?” He muttered, but he avoided her eyes and picked up a dishtowel on the counter. Wadding the towel into a ball, he tossed it into the sink.
    “Jon, what’s going on?”
    “I don’t know, I just get the feeling that…that somebody—a man without a face—is after us. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true.
    “Do you know who he is?”
    Jon shook his head, but his face drained of color and his pupils dilated despite the brightness of the day. Snatching a tennis ball that he’d left on the counter, he kneaded it nervously in his fingers. “But I keep hearing the word father. I told you.” Her insides curled in on themselves and she gripped the back of a kitchen chair for support.
    The criminal.
    If only Jon’s dreams could be haunted by some other beast. She’d been dodging the truth, and now it was getting to be a problem. Jon didn’t know he was adopted; she’d promised not to ever confide in him, but that seemed impossible in today’s technology of blood typing and DNA testing. Fortunately Jon had never hurt himself badly enough to need blood or been ill so that he needed an organ or bone marrow or anything else that would require tissue typing and a match. Kate prayed that her luck would hold until he was an adult. Then, if the subject ever came up, she might confide in him. But not now. Not when he was still young and vulnerable.
    There were other reasons as well. She was afraid that if Jon found out the truth that his natural parents hadn’t wanted him, the knowledge would scar him, shake the underpinnings of his self-esteem, and…she had to face it, she was scared of the truth and that he’d want to leave, to search out his “real” parents, to find out why he was different from the other children, if there was a reason, a genetic trait that had been passed from one generation to the next.
    She’d thought that he might somehow divine the truth, that with his ability to see into the future, he’d know that she wasn’t his blood relative, but over the years, when he’d said nothing, asked no questions, seemed to accept her completely as his mother, she didn’t have the heart to tell him. Sooner or later, she would have to, but she wanted to wait until their relationship, so shaky recently, was strong again.
    Coward. You’re just afraid of losing him!
    He was staring at her with confused blue eyes. “Your…your father’s dead,” she said, feeding the lie that had seemed so small and innocent nearly fifteen years ago.
    “Is he?”
    God, help me. “You know it, Jon. Your father was killed—”
    “I know the story that you told me, but there’s more, isn’t there? Things I don’t know. What is it, Mom? Was there another guy? Someone you were involved with after James died?”
    “No!” she nearly shouted, her fingers curled over the top of the chair in a death grip as she lowered her voice. “There’s never been another man.”
    Still holding the ball, Jon lifted his hands to the side of his head. “I know it sounds weird, but I get this…feeling that somehow…my father…he’s alive. I know it’s stupid.” He shook his head, and Kate bit her lip.
    This wasn’t the time to tell him there was the other man, the man who had given Jon life because that man, the one who had been in prison, didn’t know where Jon was, didn’t care, probably didn’t even know that he had a son. Or did he? Was he on his way? The trepidation that had followed her around like a deadly shadow for the past fifteen years crystallized into something real and tangible and terrifying.
    “See, crazy, huh?” Jon threw the tennis ball down the hall and Houndog took off in a frantic, scrambling streak of black and white. “Maybe Todd Neider’s right. Maybe I am a freak.”
    “Of course you aren’t,” she said, her mouth feeling dry as cotton. She walked over and tried