The Taken Read Online Free Page A

bedrest, Hazel. You can’t heal in bed. You have to move.”
    “It hurts to move, Gary.”
    “It should. Your back is a mess. But movement and pain are the only way through to as full a healing as you’re going to get.”
    Now, after Wingate’s visit and lunch with Glynnis, she was so bored even exercise seemed an escape. She decided to try the stairs. She crossed the basement to the door that led to upstairs and opened it. The stairs looked like a job for a professional climber. She grabbed the banister and started up. She felt like she was emerging from a cave.
    The upper part of the house was full of light. The upstairs clocks her mother had told her about she now saw for the first time; their incessant ticking gave the house a fugitive presence, like there were people whispering in its rooms. What kind of person needed to know the time wherever they stood? Perhaps a woman who was counting her luck, and had to mark every blessed second of it.
    She strolled slowly through the living room, with its leather couch and chairs, the widescreen television sentinel in a corner, the fireplace with its pristine unburnt logs waiting for another winter to lend their hearthy romantic glow to the house. She saw Glynnis and Andrew cuddling on the couch, murmuring things to each other, indulging whatever conversational shorthand they’d developed with each other, only a word of which would be enough to make her crazy. She touched nothing, but looked closely. A line of old, heavy books lined the mantelpiece on either side of a rococo silver clock. Decorator books, never read. Probably cost them a pretty penny, too. There was another set of stairs off the living room that led to the bedrooms, although she knew her mother slept on the main floor, in what was Andrew’s office. She went there next, passing the dining room. She glanced in and saw the exact centrepiece she imagined would be there: a tangle of twigs with dried berries and little silver objects in it, stars and planets, and a big, thick red candle sticking up out of the middle of it. The wick was white; Glynnis had never lit it. Perhaps they argued about it.
Why did I buy you this nice thing if you never use it?
But then Glynnis’s answer presented itself right away:
Because if I use it, it won’t be the lovely, thoughtful thing you bought me one day for no reason but that you loved me
. Goddamnit.
    Emily’s bed was tightly made and covered with a thick hand-sewn quilt. She didn’t recognize it. Did Glynnis quilt, too? There was a pile of books by the bed. A couple of puzzle books with a pen clipped into one of them, and a novel or two. But the book on top was one of Glynnis’s for sure:
Talking to Yourself: A Dreamer’s Guide
. Hazel hoped it was evidence of her mother ingratiating herself; it frightened her to think of Glynnis trying to inculcate her mother. But she couldn’t imagine it; Emily was the original skeptic. She opened the book at random:
    SHRUBS, SMALL FLOWERING PLANTS : Red or yellow flowers signify financial windfall; white flowers are unexpected visitors. Flowerless shrubs can mean respiratory problems or digestive issues. A dream of potted flowers is a warning of a suffocating relationship, especially if the petals have begun to fall.

    She closed the book and put it back exactly where she found it. The phone began to ring in the kitchen and she hobbled down the hall to it. When she picked it up, she was out of breath.
    “You okay?” came Wingate’s voice.
    “Fine, I’m fine.”
    “Were you sleeping?”
    “No, James. What’s wrong?”
    “I think you better come in. Can I send a car around?”
    “What’s going on? What happened?”
    “I’m sending a car.”
    Hazel knew the name Barlow. A George Barlow had once owned one of the largest apple orchards in Westmuir County. He’d sold it fifteen years ago and now it was a pick-your-own operationthat was gradually transforming into a county fair/family amusement park that did most of its