Jed's Sweet Revenge Read Online Free Page B

reciting to her. Her parents were sitting in the van’s front seats, listening. Nate and she were sitting in the backseat, and she had just taken his hand in hers. Then her life stopped.
    In the big hospital up the coast at Savannah, a doctor told her that her parents and her boyfriend were dead. The drunk driver went back to Atlanta with a fine and probation. After that, Thena stayed away from the mainland as much as possible.
    “The past is gone,” she muttered out loud. She was too tired even to grieve now. Thena stood up in the darkness on the beach and wearily called forCendrillon. “Cyrano is gone and won’t be back,” she told herself sternly.
    Thena turned and looked toward the forest, toward the quiet glade where she’d scooped out a deep hole in the sand for his resting place. “Good-bye,” she said finally, her voice soft and stricken. It was time to go home and await the rest of Beneba’s prophecy.
       All the next morning Jed debated the words to use when he talked to Thena Sainte-Colbet again. There was no solution but to walk back through the forest to her house and confront her as diplomatically as he could. Trouble was, he didn’t know diplomatic words; he knew plain, straight words.
    He spent the whole morning procrastinating and planning while he explored the island’s beaches, picking up seashells. Even mundane clamshells fascinated him, because he’d never seen a shell except those glued to plastic ashtrays in tourist shops. He took off his shirt and boots, rolled up the faded legs of his jeans, then stretched out in the shade of a gnarled pine tree on the edge of the sand dunes to examine his finds.
    At midafternoon he ate a meal of crackers and Spam, put on his shirt and boots again, and walked into the forest. Today no welcoming party met him, and he went straight to the rambling old house.
    “Ma’am?” he called through the screen door. No answer. Jed cupped his hands around his eyes and squinted into the dark, cool interior. He saw heavy, upholstered furniture that had endured a lot of years. Packed bookcases lined almost every wall. Jed noticed that the big room included a huge dining table and a kitchen in one corner. Large, open windows, their shutters pulled back for the summer, let in filtered sunlight and the constant island breeze.
    It was a friendly place with pine plank walls painted white and cheerful print curtains. A high ceilingand a central hall combined to draw air through the house and keep it cool. Jed felt the delicious breeze against his back as he stood at the front door.
    “Thena, you home?” he called again, louder. Speaking her name out loud for the first time gave him a pleasant thrill. Jed idly tested the screen door, and it opened. This was, after all, his house. Everything on Sancia Island was his except for the personal effects left by Lewis Simmons, the caretaker his grandfather Gregg had hired forty years ago.
    Jed stepped into the cool house, feeling a little guilty nonetheless. He was a deeply private man, and he respected other people’s privacy, but he also itched to look at everything that had to do with Thena Sainte-Colbet.
    He walked slowly around the main room, scanning the bookcases. Now he remembered that Lewis Simmons had been some sort of scientist who studied plants. And the lawyers had mentioned something about Simmons’s daughter and her husband doing the same kind of work. These books showed that.
    Jed stopped by something so odd it made him whistle under his breath. A big color television console occupied a corner of the room like a visitor from another planet. Jed ran his blunt-tipped fingers over the VCR unit that sat on top of it.
    He’d walked around the house yesterday to look at the cistern for catching rainwater. Next to it he’d found the shed that contained the gas-run generator that provided electricity. Thena lived in isolation on a deserted island, but she had a color TV and a VCR. It made no sense, but then not much