Whispers from the Dead Read Online Free Page B

me, I’m going to run to the grocery store for a few minutes,” Mom said.
    “You’re leaving?” Dee Dee was half out of her chair.
    Mom threw Dee Dee a puzzled look, rummaged under a pile of rumpled packing paper for her keys and purse, waved good-bye, and left.
    Dee Dee turned to me and asked, “Why don’t we go to my house?” That strange expression was on her face again.
    I sat down beside her and poured a little more Cokeinto my glass. “We just started these. We can stay here until we finish, can’t we?”
    “Uh, yes. I guess so,” she answered.
    As I looked over at Dee Dee she deliberately brightened. She took a big slurp of Coke, fought back a burp, blinked, and said, “Tell me, do you have any pets? A dog or a cat?”
    For an instant her question took me by surprise, but I remembered Dee Dee’s wary look as we entered the house. I knew at the time she wasn’t paying attention to what I’d been saying. “We have a cat. She’s still boarding at the vet’s,” I answered, and patiently repeated everything I’d told her about Dinky.
    “I’ll tell you about Memorial High,” Dee Dee said. “There’s this ‘in’ group, of course, but forget them. Who needs them, huh? I like people who are interesting because they’re different, don’t you?” She began to relate a funny story about some guy she knew at school, but I tuned
her
out. That horrible experience I’d had the day before wasn’t a hallucination, and it wasn’t something growing from my imagination. There
was
something strange about this house, and Dee Dee knew what it was.
    How was I going to get her to tell me?
    “—so that’s what he said, and he never knew why he got in trouble!” Dee Dee laughed, and I laughed with her. I wondered what the joke was.
    “You said you hadn’t been in this house before. Would you like to see the rest of it?” I asked.
    She stiffened but finally answered, “Sure. Why not?”
    Dee Dee tagged closely after me. She didn’t give a second thought to the whirlpool in the master bathroom.The Pritchards had one too. “Same builder. He did everything on this block,” Dee Dee said. “Our Colonial’s probably the largest. Mom went nuts over those pillars across the front of the house. Frankly I think it’s too
Gone with the Wind
inside and out. It should have come with Rhett Butler.”
    She continued to babble until we crossed the entry hall and headed up the stairs. She not only fell silent but also seemed to be holding her breath. The guest bedroom was cluttered with boxes we hadn’t sorted through yet, but my room was fairly well put together.
    “Good.” Dee Dee gave a relieved sigh. “You’ve got the back bedroom. Adam had the front.”
    I whirled and faced her. “What are you talking about?”
    She looked as though she’d been caught cheating on an exam. “N-nothing,” she said, stammering. “I was just rattling on. Everybody says I talk too much. You’ve learned that about me by this time.”
    “Who’s Adam?”
    She shrugged. “Adam Holt.”
    “I thought you hadn’t been in this house.”
    “I haven’t. Mom described the house to us when she listed it for sale.”
    I leaned against the chest of drawers and said, “Okay. Now tell me about Adam Holt.”
    “Adam ignored me,” Dee Dee said, “which was just as well.” I must have looked puzzled because she quickly added, “He was very charming when he felt like it. He was …” She hesitated, searching for the right word. “Seductive.”
    “Seductive?” I echoed. “That’s a strange way to describe him.”
    “Adam was strange, period,” she insisted. “He wouldn’t even bother to speak to most of the people on the block.” She sneaked a quick, defensive glance at herself in the mirror over the chest of drawers and added, “It wasn’t just me.”
    “But ‘seductive’? What did you mean by that?”
    “Adam could make girls fall all over him.” She leaned closer to me, although there was no one around to hear,