Read Online Killer's Cousin by Nancy Werlin - Free Book Online Page B

watched high schools for a living, didn’t they? They’d have followed the case as a matter of professional interest.
    â€œHey. You okay?”
    There was a tall girl standing next to me, frowning at me solicitously. I hadn’t even heard her mount the porch steps. She had loose brown hair. She wore a man’s white dress shirt open over a tight T-shirt. Baggy old jeans. Boots. Lipstick. Impartially speaking, and even in my current state, she was enough to make your mouth go dry.
    Raina Doumeng. The artist who lived on the first floor; the one with the empty living room.
    Somehow I managed to straighten up, and in the process I dropped the CD again. Raina caught it one-handed; looked at it. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “What a nightmare. No wonder you look sick.” She smiled and put out her hand, introduced herself. “I feel for you, really I do. I did all that two years ago. I’m at Tufts now, their joint program with the museum school.” She said it like I was supposed to know what museum she meant.
    â€œDavid,” I said. I didn’t include my last name. I couldn’t, just then. She was so beautiful and she was smiling. “I live upstairs.” We shook hands. Hers was callused. I fumbled for something else to say. I didn’t want her to go in, to go away. I didn’t want to be alone, even though it was better that way. “Uh—why don’t you live on campus?”
    â€œOh, I need room. To paint, for one thing. Plus, I like privacy.” She was examining my face, feature by feature. I knew she knew. I knew she was thinking about Emily. Thinking:
This is a killer
.
    She said: “Hey, you got a Star Market card?”
    â€œWhat?” I pulled myself together. “Uh, yeah.” I did have a grocery card. You used it at the checkout and got discounts.
    Raina extracted a blue card from her wallet. She held it out and, confused, I took it. ALAN BAWDEN , said the name on the card. She looked at me expectantly. “Well?” she said. “Give me yours.”
    My card said DAVID YAFFE . Uncertainly, I handed it over.
    â€œUnbelievable. This one’s really yours!” She shook her head. “Listen, start swapping, okay? The marketing people use these things to track our spending patterns. But if you swap, you thwart ’em. I trade at least once a week.”
    She seemed entirely earnest. She had already pocketed my card. I had a fleeting moment of suspicion … but what would the tabloids want with my supermarket card? “How do you trade?” I asked. “Do you just walk up to strangers and ask them?”
    â€œYeah.” She smiled. “Like I just did.”
    Slowly, I put the ALAN BAWDEN card away. I was unable to find anything else to say. I looked at her. She looked back at me.
    And then she seemed to come to some decision. “Want to come in for some tea? I’ll tell you how to get through the college application stuff. You’ll benefit from my mistakes.”
    I didn’t think I would, but that hardly mattered. I couldn’t understand why any girl would invite me anywhere. Any
sane
girl, that is. Maybe she really didn’t recognize me; maybe that careful examination of my face was just the kind of thing artists did. I opened my mouth to say no. “Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
    I’d been wrong; her living room was not completely empty. There was simply no
furniture
in it. Instead, the two main walls were occupied by large canvases on which paintings—huge, colorful faces—were in progress. One short and one tall stepladder stood open in the middle of the room. The dining room was in exactly the same state, except it held three paintings and no ladders. The faces in the paintings were all different and yet they were not.
    I stopped to look for a long time at one of them, a woman with calm opaque eyes and gaunt green cheeks.
    â€œDo you just paint portraits?” I