Read With Every Breath for Free Online

without fear of blinking and finding him gone again. Maybe, she thought, after a few
    weeks of safety, of peace, her pictures would even come back.
    Maybe.
    Little by little, the accumulated tension of the day— of the last several days—drained out of her. She would have to do something about a telephone the next day, she thought, but that was then.
    "Hello, hello."
    The voice shattered her quiet thoughts. Maddie came out of the rocker with a startled cry, tripping over the ends of the afghan.
    She looked wildly around at the darkness. She found the man who had spoken off to the left side of the house. Her pulse tripped with learned panic, but his arms were loose and unthreatening at his sides.
    "Hi," Maddie answered cautiously.
    "You came back. I’m glad."
    There was something about his voice. It was too . . . hearty, she thought, almost like a politician’s tone. It tried too hard. She moved over to the railing, where she could see him more clearly. His head was too big, and his lips seemed . . . rubbery. His complexion was pockmarked, and his hair was the color of old dishwater, dirty and very thin.
    She realized that he was at least mildly mentally retarded. And suddenly, understanding that, Maddie remembered him. It came to her like the slow, spreading light filtering out the living room window just beside him. He was deficient, she remembered, and people—mostly children—tormented him because of it. But . . . yes, she thought, he had always been kind to her.
    It was her first real memory of anything on Candle, and she was inordinately relieved by it.
    "August?" she asked. "No . . . Angus!"
    His ugly face lit up. "They said you don’t remember, but I knew you wouldn’t do that to me. I’m glad." "Thanks." Then she frowned. "Who told you I didn’t remember?"
    Angus closed his eyes, obviously thinking. "I went down to the boats."
    Maddie nodded her encouragement.
    "I go there every day. To get the fish they don’t . . . they don’t wholesale." He gave the word triumphantly. "Oh."
    "Harry said you came. He brought you over."
    Harry must be that old man who had been standing up near the pilothouse on the ferry, she realized. She’d thought he’d been watching her, but she hadn’t spoken to him. She was amazed. She wondered how in the world had he recognized her after all that time?
    "Would you like to come up and sit down?" she invited.
    "Only one chair," Angus pointed out.
    "Yes, well, I could sit on the step." He began shaking his head emphatically. "Or you could," she added.
    His face creased with thought again. "That would be okay."
    She watched him come around to the front of the porch, walk up the handicapped ramp, and sit down on the top step of the stairs. The ramp was reasonably new plywood, as though it had been tacked on as an afterthought. "Would you like a glass of wine?" she offered. " No!"
    She flinched back a little when he shouted. Touched a nerve there, she thought. "Well, that’s all right. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to."
    "You shouldn’t, either."
    "What? Drink wine?"
    He nodded. "Bad. It’s very bad for you."
    "Well, I guess it could be, if I drank too much of it. But I don’t usually do that." She smiled self-deprecatingly, and it seemed to relax him.
    Angus’s big head swiveled around so he could look back at the house. "You have a boy now."
    Maddie nodded, smiling more naturally. "Yes. His name is Josh."
    "That’s a good name. Good."
    "Yes, I think so, too," she responded, amused.
    "Where did you go when they took you away from here?"
    Maddie caught up with the seemingly unchanneled turns of his mind. "Florida. My aunt came and took me back to Florida with her."
    "Was she nice to you?"
    "Yes, yes, she was."
    "That’s good. You were nice to me."
    Maddie nodded, unsurprised by that. Being with him, for all his stilted conversation, felt just fine. It must have been a wholesome, if odd, friendship that they’d shared.
    "That time when they threw rocks at me outside