Winter's Daughter Read Online Free Page A

jump from the wheelchair on two good legs if her life and health were at risk. She’d been living on the streets for weeks; she almost felt like one of them now—the legions of the lost, the faceless, the homeless, the ones who’d somehow slipped through the cracks of a system that prided itself on its benevolence.
    But I’m not really one of them. When I get cold or hungry, I can go home.
    Or frightened.
    Even with hot water sluicing over her body, her skin prickled and tingled with a rush of gooseflesh. That wino she’d met today— She’d thought about it all the way home, and she still didn’t know what it was about him that was so different. Partly, she knew, it was the man’s eyes. Most of the time they had been in shadow, but the one clear glimpse she’d had of them, there beside Gunner’s newsstand, had completely unnerved her. There had been intelligence there, and complete awareness. The man had acted drunk, but his eyes hadn’t looked drunk. One could be faked; the other couldn’t. Why had he pretended to be drunk when he wasn’t? It was a puzzle.
    When Tannis finally emerged from the bathroom, she found her sister sitting on the bed, scraping at her nails with an emery board and frowning.
    "Josh is watching Sesame Street," Lisa said, tossing the nail file into the drawer of the bedside table and dusting her hands. "While we have some privacy, I want you to tell me what’s wrong."
    "What makes you think something’s wrong?" Despite her denial, Tannis knew perfectly well it was pointless. Lisa was nothing if not tenacious.
    Sure enough, the little crease between her sister’s eyes only deepened. "Why did you decide to come home?"
    Tannis bent forward at the waist, toweling her hair. "Nothing’s wrong," she said as she rubbed with unnecessary vigor at her scalp. "I told you—I just got tired of being itchy and filthy—"
    "Bull pucky," her sister said primly.
    "Bull what?" Laughing, Tannis straightened to give her trim, fastidious, suburban–housewife and perfect–mother sister a look of astonishment. Lisa returned it with one of complete aplomb. Still chuckling, Tannis said, "Look, Lisa, I know you always think—"
    "And I’m always right, aren’t I? I always know when something’s bothering you that you don’t want anyone to know about. Remember the time you got in trouble at school for putting chocolate milk in a water pistol and shooting the substitute teacher with it? And then you forged the note from Mom to the principal, telling him she couldn’t come to the conference because she was in the hospital having her appendix out?"
    "There’s a lot to be said," Tannis remarked darkly, "for being an only child."
    "Yeah, well, there’s a lot to be said for brothers and sisters too. How about that big kid from—I forget—Chicago, or someplace—who decided to collect a toll in the rest room? You were afraid to tell anyone, but I got it out of you and told Mike and Jerry. Didn’t you love the look on that girl’s face when all four of us showed up in the girl’s bathroom? And remember the time in eighth grade, when you were stringing those two guys along because you couldn’t decide which one you liked best, and It was eating you alive—remember?"
    "I remember," Tannis said softly.
    "I got that out of you too," Lisa said.
    "And didn’t tell anyone." Tannis sighed and closed her eyes. "All right, so I’m—a little rattled, I guess. Something happened today. Something that kind of scared me."
    "More than ’kind of,’ I’d say," Lisa murmured. "So what was it?"
    Tannis threw her a frustrated look and picked up a hairbrush. She shrugged. "Oh, nothing really important, just this wino followed me, and then tried to waylay me. No big deal. I handled it okay. In fact—" She paused to smile grimly. "The last I saw of him, he was being hauled off by two cops in a patrol car."
    "Doesn’t sound like anything you haven’t had to deal with before," Lisa said, the little crease of concern