House of Fallen Trees Read Online Free Page B

PC. She didn’t quite have the courage yet to touch the laptop, fearing the same message would start popping up all over again.
   Sipping coffee, she did her best to dig up info on Sean, which consisted of a few articles in Washington newspapers about his going missing without a trace. She found nothing she didn’t already know.
   Next, she searched for anything regarding his partner, Rory Luden, and also turned up next to nothing, except that he was a summer school teacher of social studies in Indigo Bend, Washington, and often traveled to Spokane to run marathons. He had no personal website she could find and, from what she could gather, was about as private a person as she herself was. Of course, being a gay man living in East Bum Fuck Nowhere could have had something to do with that. She doubted the lumber town he called home could be an easy place to be gay in. Most small towns, she knew, were filled with less than liberal minds.
   Though she continued to turn up nothing, she kept searching anyway. It wasn’t until her coffee had grown cold that she sat back with a sigh and admitted maybe she couldn’t find anything because there was nothing to find.
   Drumming her fingers on the desk, she wracked her brain, doing her best to remember any friends Sean had had before he moved away to the Northwest.
   She could think of no one. Even his high school friends remained elusive in her mind. She just hadn’t paid much attention to them at the time.
   Maybe her mother would remember some of them, she thought. But asking her mom would be opening up a whole new can of worms to wade through.
   “Fuck,” she whispered, reluctant to give up so soon.
   After several minutes of trying to think her way out of the box, she decided to give it a break. Work on her novel for a while. That at least would cheer her up some.
   She clicked off the Internet and went into her Microsoft Word program, opening the file called DMASQUE and scrolling down to where she had left off the last time she’d worked on it. Her eyes flicked over the words, rereading what she’d written as she grabbed her mug for a sip of coffee. The instant the liquid touched her lips, she grimaced. There was nothing worse than cold coffee, as far as she was concerned.
   A new cup was in order. She went to the kitchen, refilled the mug from the still warm carafe, nuked it a minute for good measure, then returned to her office, chilly hands wrapped around the hot porcelain.
   The mug tumbled from her hands, splashing her lower body with hot coffee, but Karen barely noticed.
   On the screen, the words TWO MEN HAVE THE CARCASS were repeated endlessly on the page, the cursor blinking at the end of an unfinished line: TWO MEN .
   Still, Karen did not scream. She sank to her knees, a squeak of confusion escaping her throat.
   She was losing her mind.
   That was the only explanation that made sense. Hallucinating, maybe. Or asleep. This could be a dream.
   She clung to that thought like the victim of a shipwreck clinging to a rotten wooden board in a vast black sea, no moon, no stars, no land in sight.
   Just sleeping. Dreaming. A very bad dream, but still just a dream.
   On the floor, she curled into the fetal position and closed her eyes, lips moving silently, repeating the word “Asleep” over and over, until she finally was.
   When she awoke, she realized she was cold and wet. Sitting up, she remembered everything and saw that she had curled up on the floor in a puddle of coffee, among broken shards of the mug she’d dropped.
   Running a hand over her mouth, she stared suspiciously through the dark up at her computer monitor. It was blank.
   No matter.
   She knew what she had to do now.
   Whether Sean was dead or alive didn’t matter anymore. She had to find him. That was what her subconscious had been trying to tell her with all its sleight of hand tricks.