Fear Itself Read Online Free Page B

room (the lock had been broken for years and Catherine had even given up on bugging me to fix it). Money was pretty tight, and there was no telling how long we would have to stay at the hotel or more importantly how soon we could reoccupy the crime scene which was our home. I didn’t have any local family to speak of. My parents were dead and I had no siblings, so the only family I had for hundreds of miles was Catherine’s parents. Staying there was obviously not an option. I didn’t want to spend what little cash I had or the limited available balance on my credit cards on clothes knowing that we might be in desperate straights before long.
    Outside of our room we made our way down the long poorly lit hallway decorated with outdated and dingy red and gold wallpaper and stained and worn royal red carpeting. The light fixtures were the plastic globed sort with the grooved lines through which you could easily make out the pot-bellied outline of the incandescent light-bulb. Sarah pressed the elevator button with the down arrow and I could hear the elevator bellow and grunt from a distant place below us before finally opening. From inside the elevator we could hear long cumbersome groans, very much like a recording of whales under water I’d heard on the nature channel, as we descended to the lobby. The Lobby was the only modern aspect of the building. The carpet was hunter-green near the elevators and the lobby itself had ivory marbled floors and bright white and gold walls with newer crystal sconces and a large brass chandelier which towered before the twin glass exit doors. The beauty of the lobby was basically a lie, foretelling of lavish updated rooms which might well be in the offing but were obviously not. A clerk with a round boyish face and a curly mop of black hair in a hunter-green uniform stood behind a long Corian topped desk with an absent minded look on his face and he seemed almost startled when Sarah rang the little bell on the counter even though he had watched us as we approached.
    I checked out of our room, optimistic that we could return home before nightfall. In television detective shows it seemed that crime scenes were often tied up for days, weeks or months. That couldn’t be the case in real life, I thought. I often worked from home after-all and I was basically out of business without my computer. I needed to work to pay the bills. They couldn’t deny me the provision of income for my family, I thought.
    Sarah and I climbed into my car. We put our seatbelts on and, as usual, she held my hand while I drove. Her face looked tired, but she was smiling a little.
    “Are we going to see mommy now?” “No honey, we’re going home to get some clothes.”
    “When will we get to see mommy?” “Not for a long time.”
    Her upper lip rolled into a pout and she started to cry. I squeezed her little hand.
    “I want to go see mommy in heaven.” Given that she was already crying I didn’t want to upset her further. “We’ll see.”
    “Will she be normal in heaven?” She tried to control the tremor in her voice.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Will she be blue, like she was on the bed?”
    I squeezed her little fingers again, “No, sweetheart, she isn’t blue anymore.”
    Sarah undid her seatbelt and looked up at me to see if I would protest. Normally I would have forced her to buckle it right back up. But her face was begging me to let her crawl under my arm so I lifted my arm and she slid beneath it and up against me. I held her tight. I wanted to make it all better for her, but there was no way to do that. I felt so helpless.
    When I pulled into my driveway there were several police cars camped out along with some vans. I took no notice of the lettering on the vans assuming that they belonged to the police department and held forensic equipment or something of that nature. I got out of the car pulling Sarah with me, and lifted her up into my arms. I carried her up the driveway. Detective Bergant