The Lost by Jack Ketchum Read Free Book Online Page A

all she does is watch TV in the dayroom. She’s not eating right either. That’s why he’s asked me to come on out. He thinks maybe it might help. Pull her back some. Might help her to see you too.”
    “It’s not gonna help, dad.”
    “We can’t know if we don’t try.”
    The last thing in the world she wanted to do was fly to California to visit her ghost of a mother in the funny farm, and they both knew that seeing Deke was just a carrot. Though if her mother had really gone wholly nonverbal, it must at least have cut down on the rages. But she’d mostly stopped thinking of her mother as her mother years ago. She’d gone from mom to that screaming crazy bitch to pretty much zero .
    Where once her mother was a fire inside her now she was barely embers.
    There were times she was furious with her father for relocating them to this nowhere town, times she absolutely longed for San Francisco because San Francisco was a happening town and this was not, this was just hills and lakes and long winding roads. There was no Fillmore here, there was no Telegraph like there was in Berkeley, no music scene and hardly any dope scene but going back for a weekend wasn’t going to cut it with her, wasn’t going to make up for anything. Especially if it involved her mother.
    She shook her head. “Sorry, dad. No way.”
    “Is it the place or is it her, Kath?”
    “I guess it’s both.”
    “It’s a nice place.”
    “It’s all dressed up like a nice place. It’s still a place where everybody inside is crazy.”
    Her father sighed again and sipped his lemonade. There was no denying the truth of what she said and he knew it. He wasn’t the sort of man who would argue with her just to get his way.
    “You’ll be all right alone here?”
    “Sure. Etta’ll be around.”
    Etta would be around during the days . The nights she’d have to herself and that was fine. It presented possibilities. They had only been in town since the end of the school year, a little over a month and she didn’t know much of anybody. But there was Ray now for one. And the best way to get acquainted with somebody, she thought, was to dive right in.
    “Well, I guess what I’ll do is book a flight for Friday after work, come back some time Sunday night. Sound all right?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “You sure you won’t come along with me, Kath?”
    “I’m sure.”
    They finished their lemonade and her father went back to his shop and she climbed the stairs to her bedroom. The shop, she thought, was part of the way he dealt with things.
    Dirty or not, the shop was good for him.
    She found the number Ray’d given her in her wallet and lay down on the bed and dialed.
    “Bates Motel.”
    “Huh?”
    “Did I say Bates? I meant Starlight. Is this who I think it is?”
    “You always answer your phone that way?”
    “I gave you my private number. On the other line I do it straight.”
    “Oh.”
    “This is great! You called me!”
    “You’re surprised?”
    “Yes and no.”
    “Which yes and which no?”
    “Hmmm. Well, now you got me in a kind of a position here.”
    “How’s that?”
    “Well, anything I say is going to make me look sort of egotistical.”
    “Which is to say you’re not egotistical.”
    “Let’s just say I was hoping you’d call because you wouldn’t give me your number. And then I would have had to find it out myself.”
    “You wouldn’t have found it. It’s unlisted.”
    “I’d have found it. Vee haff ways . Or else maybe I’d have had to stake out your house for a couple of days, accost you on the street, you know, that kind of thing.”
    “I don’t know if I’d have liked that.”
    “Doesn’t that sort of depend on how I did the accosting? Like with a dozen long-stem roses maybe, a bottle of champagne, couple of tickets to Paris?”
    “It might make a difference.”
    He was making her smile and that was good because now she felt more secure about what she was going to suggest to him. It was treachery. But only