Read Even the Dead for Free Online Page B

voice. “I have to find somewhere to hide.”
    “Hide?” Phoebe said, a tingle running down her spine. “Hide from what?”
    Lisa gave another quick shake of the head. “I can’t tell you.” She was even less of a smoker than Phoebe was, and kept taking little pecks at her cigarette and letting the smoke out almost as soon as she had drawn it in. “Something happened,” she said. “Something—terrible, and I have to get away.” She turned her head suddenly and looked directly at Phoebe. Her lower lip was trembling, and she seemed on the point of tears. Her eyes were a glittering shade of green. “Will you help me? There’s no one else I can ask.” She looked away then and put a hand to her forehead. “What am I saying? We’re practically strangers, we’ve hardly exchanged a word before in our lives, and here I am, begging you to help me. You must think I’m mad.”
    Phoebe frowned. What was she supposed to say, what was she supposed to do? It was true, they were strangers, or as good as; certainly she knew nothing about this young woman, who she was or where she came from or why she was in such a desperate state. Yet she felt a tug of sympathy for her, and a sense that she must find a way to help her. Phoebe knew what fear was, knew what it was to be frightened and alone.
    “But tell me,” Phoebe said, “why you came to me?”
    “I didn’t! I just looked in the window of the café and saw you there and recognized you. I remembered you from the course. You seemed nice. So I wrote the note and asked the waitress to give it to you.” She took another quick, ineffectual drag on her cigarette. “I have no one, no one I can go to. My mother is dead, my father—” She stopped again, and tears welled in her eyes. “There’s no one,” she whispered, “no one.”
    Phoebe looked around. On the bench next to them a tramp was asleep, lying full-length on his side with his joined hands cradling his cheek; he looked, Phoebe thought, like the figure of a saint on a tomb. By the pond a small boy was trying to launch a toy sailboat, his nursemaid in her white bonnet standing by, seeming bored and distracted. Ducks quacked, waggling their rear ends. A seagull swooped down, veered, and climbed the air again. The sky was blue, with little white puffs of floating cloud. This was the world, familiar, comforting; terror had no place here, yet here it was, plain in this young woman’s face, in her trembling hands, in the wild look of her eyes.
    “What do you want to do?” Phoebe asked.
    “What?” Lisa stared at her, uncomprehending.
    “I mean, do you want to leave the country, is that it?”
    “Yes. No. It doesn’t matter. No, I don’t want to go away. I can’t. I just need somewhere to be for a while, somewhere where no one will find me.”
    “And you can’t tell me why.”
    “No. Not now, anyway.” She shook her head yet again. “You probably think I’m some kind of con artist, trying to fool you into helping me so I can rob you. I swear, I’m not.”
    Phoebe had an urge to put a hand on hers, but didn’t.
    “I believe you,” she said, not knowing what it was exactly she was supposed to believe in.
    The young woman caught something in her tone and looked at her more closely. “Have you been in trouble, in your life?”
    “Yes,” Phoebe said, “I have. A long time ago—at least, it seems a long time.”
    “What was it?—what happened?”
    “It doesn’t matter. When you’re ready to tell me your story, maybe I’ll tell you mine. In the meantime, I think I know a place where you can go.”
    “A place? Where?”
    “At the seaside. Come on, I have to make a phone call.”
    Lisa, who had relaxed a little, was suddenly tense again. “Come where?”
    “Just over to the Shelbourne. There’s a public phone there, in the bar—I always use it.”
    Lisa pressed her lips together tightly. She seemed very young suddenly, like a stubborn child. “I don’t want to go in there, into that hotel,”