Club Dead - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,10
I had with Bill. I’d told Bill I wasn’t going to be passed around like a Christmas fruitcake.
But Eric had already come to me, so I didn’t even have the chance to decide whether or not to follow Bill’s last piece of advice.
I lost the trail of my thought. It had never been a clear one anyway.
Oh, Bill, where are you?I buried my face in my hands.
My head was throbbing with exhaustion, and even my cozy kitchen was chilly in this small hour. I rose to go to bed, though I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I needed Bill with such gut-clenching intensity that I wondered if it was somehow abnormal, if I’d been enchanted by some supernatural power.
Though my telepathic ability provided immunity from the vampires’ glamour, maybe I was vulnerable to another power? Or maybe I was just missing the only man I’d ever loved. I felt eviscerated, empty, and betrayed. I felt worse than I had when my grandmother had died, worse than when my parents had drowned. When my parents had died, I’d been very young, and maybe I hadn’t fully comprehended, all at once, that they were permanently gone. It was hard to remember now. When my grandmother had died a few months ago, I had taken comfort in the ritual surrounding death in the South.
And I’d known they hadn’t willingly left me.
I found myself standing in the kitchen doorway. I switched off the overhead light.
Once I was wrapped up in bed in the dark, I began crying, and I didn’t stop for a long, long time. It was not a night to count my blessings. It was a night when every loss I’d ever had pressed hard on me. It did seem I’d had more bad luck than most people. Though I made a token attempt to fend off a deluge of self-pity, I wasn’t too successful. It was pretty much twined in there with the misery of not knowing Bill’s fate.
I wanted Bill to curl up against my back; I wanted his cool lips on my neck. I wanted his white hands running down my stomach. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted him to laugh off my terrible suspicions. I wanted to tell him about my day; about the stupid problem I was having with the gas company, and the new channels our cable company had added. I wanted to remind him that he needed a new washer on the sink in his bathroom, let him know that my brother, Jason, had found out he wasn’t going to be a father after all (which was good, since he wasn’t a husband, either).
The sweetest part of being a couple was sharing your life with someone else.
But my life, evidently, had not been good enough to share.
Chapter Three
WHEN THE SUNcame up, I’d managed a half hour of sleep. I started to rise and make some coffee, but there didn’t seem to be much point. I just stayed in bed. The phone rang during the morning, but I didn’t pick it up. The doorbell rang, but I didn’t answer it.
At some point toward the middle of the afternoon, I realized that there was one thing I had to do, the task Bill had insisted on my accomplishing if he was delayed. This situation exactly fit what he’d told me.
Now I sleep in the largest bedroom, formerly my grandmother’s. I wobbled across the hall to my former room. A couple of months before, Bill had taken out the floor of my old closet and made it into a trapdoor. He’d established a lighttight hidey-hole for himself in the crawl space under the house. He’d done a great job.
I made sure I couldn’t be seen from the window before I opened the closet door. The floor of the closet was bare of everything but the carpet, which was an extension of the one cut to fit the room. After I’d retracted the flap that covered the closet floor, I ran a pocketknife around the flooring and eventually pried it up. I looked down into the black box below. It was full: Bill’s computer, a box of disks, even his monitor and printer.
So Bill had foreseen this might happen, and he’d hidden his work before he’d left. He’d had some faith in me, no matter how faithless he might have been himself. I nodded, and rolled the carpet back into place, fitting it carefully into the corners. On the floor of the closet I put out-of-season things—shoe boxes