On the Verge Read Online Free Page B

hung on the wall nearby. It revealed a tired face complete with dark circles, crazy hair and red indentations from the folds of her sheets pressing too long into her cheeks.
    She headed back toward her bedroom and threw off her bathrobe and pajamas. She needed to go for a run and do some thinking, maybe sweat out some of the alcohol that was still in her system.
    She didn’t bother to wash her face or brush her teeth. She’d do that later after her shower. Right now she just needed to feel the pavement under her feet and the crisp fall air in her lungs. She closed her apartment door and bounded down the stairs to the ground floor and out the lobby door. She breathed in deeply and started off at a run as soon as her feet hit the street.
    She crossed over East Prospect and felt the leaves crunch under her feet as she entered the grassy fields of Volunteer Park. Following the curve of the hill she soon ran onto the road that circled the park’s reservoir and skirted its greenish-blue depths until she found the pathway that led up through a small stand of pines to the wide platform where Isamu Noguchi’s Black Hole Sun sculpture presided over the park like a dark omen.
    Freya always liked to pause here for a moment, especially on days like today when she was alone, to glimpse the iconic Space Needle through the sculpture’s wide aperture. Framed within Noguchi’s monolithic ring, the Needle looked tiny and distant, ready to be swallowed by the slow, centripetal force of the Sun’s archaic form.
    She continued on, headed north on the sidewalk that ran past the Seattle Asian Art Museum towards the prismatic glow of the Conservatory’s many glass-paned windows, a relic of the grand greenhouses from another time. It’s delicate beauty and Victorian roots always put her in a nostalgic mood, a bittersweet frame of mind that seemed appropriate for a temperament like hers that swung between pensively optimistic and gloomily saturnine, sometimes on a daily basis.
    Freya trotted past the sparkling conservatory and its smaller back building into the dense bushes and trees that bordered the park. There was a short, unofficial path there that Freya and others, she was sure, used as a short cut from the intriguing grounds of the park to the equally evocative space of Lake View Cemetery.
    Freya was fascinated by graveyards and this was one of the oldest and best in the Pacific Northwest. For an area that was relatively new compared to the East Coast and positively juvenile by European standards, Lake View was Seattle’s best example of the historically interesting and morbidly appealing cemetery. The simple setting and beautiful view held a certain tranquil appeal for Freya.
    She slowed her pace to a more respectful stroll. The tombstones, laid out in even measure, matched the rhythm of her silent footfalls, until her regular paces became like a funeral march, a memento mori that she paced out to the time of her own rapidly beating heart. She was enjoying this deathly promenade when a movement caught her eye and she stopped short, her skin prickling with the sudden feeling of imminent threat.
    She ducked behind a large monument, a granite obelisk, and caught her breath. She pressed her back into the stone, feeling its solidity, and tilted her head toward the grey-glowing sky, drinking in the air like a tonic, but her nerves still jangled inexplicably. Gathering her courage, Freya turned her body toward the denseness of the stone and peered around its sharply cut edge.
    Just below her at the base of a slight rise was a dark figure crouched with its head resting against a modest memorial. From her vantage point she couldn’t quite tell if it was a man or a woman, only that it radiated a kind of heavy foreboding that activated the more primitive parts of Freya’s brain, the parts that urged her to run, fast and far. She dug her fingers into the stone, willing herself to stay, to find out who this person was, but she had already begun to