Tell Me No Secrets by Joy Fielding Read Free Book Online

Administration Building, squeezing her thin fingers inside his massive palm before releasing her.
    Watch to make sure I get inside safely, she urged silently as she raced up the concrete stairs.
    But when she reached the top and turned around, he was already gone.

THREE
    T he nightmare always started the same way: Jess was sitting in the sterile reception area of a doctor’s office reading an old magazine while somewhere beside her a phone was ringing. “It’s your mother,” the doctor informed her, pulling a phone out of his large black doctor’s bag and handing it over.
    “Mother, where are you?” Jess asked. “The doctor’s waiting for you.”
    “Meet me in the John Hancock Building in fifteen minutes. I’ll explain everything when I see you.”
    Suddenly Jess stood before a bank of elevators, but no matter how many times she pressed the call button, no elevator came. Locating the stairs, she raced down the seven flights only to find the door to the outside locked. She pushed, she pulled, she begged, she cried. The door wouldn’t budge.
    In the next instant, she was in front of the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue, the sun bouncing off the sidewalk into her eyes. “Come inside,” an auburn-haired womanwith gray eyes called from the top step of the impressive structure. “The tour’s about to begin, and you’re keeping everybody waiting.”
    “I really can’t stay,” Jess told the crowd, whose faces were a blur of brown eyes and red mouths. The group paused for several minutes in front of Seurat’s masterpiece,
Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte
.
    “Let’s play connect the dots,” Don called out, as Jess broke free and hurried outside in time to leap on board a bus that was pulling away. But the bus headed in the wrong direction and she ended up in Union Station. She hailed a cab, only to have the driver misunderstand her instructions and take her to Roosevelt Road.
    He was waiting for her when she stepped out of the taxi, a faceless figure all in black, standing perfectly still by the side of the road. Immediately, Jess tried to get back in the car, but the taxi had disappeared. Slowly, the figure in black advanced toward her.
    Death
, Jess understood, bolting for the open road. “Help me!” she cried, the shadow of Death advancing effortlessly behind her as she raced up the steps of her parents’ house. She pulled open the screen door, pushing it shut after her, desperately trying to secure the latch as Death’s hand reached for the door, his face coming into clear view.
    Rick Ferguson.
    “No!” Jess screamed, lurching forward in her bed, her heart pounding, the bedding soaked with sweat.
    No wonder he’d felt so familiar, she realized, drawing her knees to her chin and sobbing, her breath slamming against her lungs, as if someone were playing racquetball in her chest. A product of her darkest imaginings, he’d stepped,quite literally, out of her dreams and into her life. The nightmares that used to haunt her were back, and the figure had a name—Rick Ferguson.
    Jess pushed away the wet sheets and struggled to her feet, only to feel her legs give way beneath her. She collapsed in a crumpled heap on the floor, trying to catch her breath, afraid she was going to throw up. “Oh God,” she muttered, addressing the panic as if it were a physical presence in the room. “Please stop. Please go away.”
    Jess stretched toward the white china lamp on the night table beside her bed and flipped on the light. The room snapped into focus: soft peaches mixed with delicate grays and blues, a double bed, a dhurrie rug, a white wicker chair over which hung her clothes for the next day, a chest of drawers, a small mirror, a poster by Niki de Saint Phalle, another by Henri Matisse. She tried to will herself back to normalcy by concentrating on the wood grain of the light oak floor, the stitching on the pale peach curtains, the white duvet, the expanse of high ceiling. One of the nice things about