Someone Is Watching Read Online Free Page A

sneakers like those.”
    “Did he say anything?”
    “No.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “He didn’t say anything.”
    Which is when I felt the man’s lips moving toward my ear, his voice penetrating the pillowcase with the same sickening force he was penetrating me.
Tell me you love me.
    My entire body started trembling. How could I forget this? How could my mind have blanked out something so obviously, terribly important?
    “He told you to tell him you loved him?” Detective Marx repeated, unable to disguise her surprise or her revulsion.
    “Yes. He repeated it twice.”
    “Did you?”
    “Did I what?”
    “Tell him you loved him?”
    “No. I called him a bastard.”
    “Good for you,” she said, and again I felt a surge of pride.
    “Okay, Bailey. This is very important. Can you tell me what he sounded like?” She was already elaborating before I could formulate a response. “Was he American? Did he have an accent? Was his voice deep or high-pitched? Did he speak with a lisp? Did he sound young or old?”
    “Young,” I said. “Or at least, not old. But not a teenager,” I qualified, trying to remember what teenagers sound like. “He was whispering—actually, it was more of a growl. I didn’t hear an accent or a lisp.”
    “Good. That’s very good, Bailey. You’re doing great. Do you think you’d recognize him if you heard that voice again?”
    Oh, God, I thought, panic making me dizzy. Please don’t let me hear that voice again. “I don’t know. Maybe. Like I said, he was whispering.” Another surge of panic. Another onslaught of tears. Another tissue. “Please, I just want to go home.”
    “Just a few more questions.”
    “No. No more questions. I’ve told you everything.”
    What I’d told her was that the man who raped me was most likely a white male of average height and weight, between the agesof twenty and forty, with brown hair and a fondness for black Nike sneakers. In other words, I’d told her nothing.
    “Okay,” she agreed, although I heard the reluctance in her voice. “Is it all right if we stop by your apartment tomorrow?”
    “What for?”
    “In case you remember anything else. Sometimes a good night’s sleep …”
    “You think I’ll sleep?”
    “I think the doctors will prescribe something to help you.”
    “You think anything will help?”
    “I know it doesn’t feel that way right now,” she said, placing a gentle hand on my arm. I forced myself not to recoil at her touch. “But eventually you
will
get over this. Your world
will
return to normal.”
    I marveled at her certainty, even as I marveled at her naïveté. When has my world ever been normal?
    A brief family history. My father, Eugene Carpenter, was married three times and spawned seven children: a girl and a boy with his first wife, three boys with his second, and Heath and me with his third. A successful entrepreneur and investor who amassed his great wealth in the stock market, regularly buying low and selling high, my father was brought to the attention of state investigators on more than one occasion because of his suspiciously good fortune. But despite their best efforts, they were never able to prove anything even approaching misconduct or malfeasance, a source of deep pride to my father and equally deep frustration to his eldest son, the assistant state’s attorney who initiated the original investigation. My father subsequently cut off all contact with his namesake, then cut him out of his will altogether. Hence the lawsuit over his estate, of which Heath and I are the chief beneficiaries. The rest of our half-siblings have joined the suit to claim what they insist is rightfully theirs.
    I can’t say I blame them. My father was, at best, a lousy husband to their mothers and an indifferent parent to all of them. What’s more, he had a warped, even cruel sense of humor. Henamed the three sons he had with his second wife Thomas, Richard, and Harrison (Tom, Dick, and Harry), and although he