Get a Clue(6)

She shivered again. Or maybe that was still. Her clothes, still wet and extremely cold against her skin, had stuck to her, probably steaming because despite her bone-deep chill, she’d also begun to sweat in sheer terror.

And then she heard it, a sound from behind her in the dark.

Just a slight scrape on the floor, which could have been a rat, a mere creak in the wood, or . . .

A footstep.

Oh, God.

Ballsy or not, this experience was quickly growing beyond her. She stumbled forward and fell into the front door. Grasping the handle, she wrenched it open.

Icy wind and snow greeted her, blasting her in the face, sliding down her collar. To add insult to injury, the horizon was pure black—no city lights, no stars, nothing but a velvety darkness. Still, propelled by fear, she took a step forward.

And sank up to her thigh.

Once when she’d been little, her grandma had given her one of those snow globes of San Francisco. Shake it up and it snowed down over the city.

In fact, it did snow in the city. Once in a blue moon. During those times the wind would slip in from the shore, chopping and dicing at any exposed skin. But in those rare events she simply stayed indoors. There was lots to do inside: hang out with friends, seduce a boyfriend, drink something warm . . .

But today was a whole new kind of cold. And this fluffy, powdered-sugar kind of snow, thick and currently up to her crotch . . . she’d never seen anything like it. Too bad she’d dressed for a chilly day looking at the snow from the inside.

Torn between sinking into the snow, never to be heard from again, or facing the dark, terrifying house, Breanne stood there in rare indecision for exactly one second, during which time another gust of wind hit her, sending her backwards a step, onto her butt in the doorway. More wet cold seeped through her denim.#p#分页标题#e#

Quickly scrambling to her feet, she fought the wind and slammed the door shut, then whirled around and flattened herself to it, blinking furiously, trying to adapt to the dark.

But there was no adapting, especially when out of that inky blackness came a low, almost rough masculine voice. “Hello?”

Oh, God. That didn’t sound like Gorgeous Naked Guy. Biting her lip to keep quiet, hands out in front of her, she tiptoed toward the reception desk where she’d first seen the note about the honeymoon suite. There’d been a phone there . . . Her fingers closed over it.

Teeth chattering in earnest now, she lifted the receiver to her ear, ready to call . . . she had no idea. It didn’t matter; she’d take the Abominable Snowman, for God’s sake.

No dial tone.

Okay, this wasn’t happening. This couldn’t really be happening. She’d stepped into some alternate universe—

She heard a click, and then a small flare of light appeared, and a face, floating in the air.

Breanne clapped her hands over her mouth to hold in her startled scream and pressed back against the wall as if she could vanish into it.

Once for Halloween she’d gone into a haunted house with a group of friends, smug and secure in the fact that having grown up with brothers, she couldn’t be frightened. And indeed, her friends had all screamed their lungs out while she calmly walked through, her mind rationally dismissing each scare. Oh, that was just a CD of scary sounds. And there . . . just a skeleton—fake, of course. And that dead body swinging overhead? With all the blood? Just ketchup.

But this was real. Her hollow stomach and slipping grip on her sanity told her that. And while she really wanted to remain cool, calm, and collected, her heart threatened to burst right out of her chest, even as she registered the truth.

The floating face wasn’t really a floating face at all, but a man holding a flashlight up beneath his chin.

Not Gorgeous Naked Guy.

No, this man was the same height but stockier, and in his twenties. He wore a hoodie sweatshirt over a baseball cap low on his forehead so she could only see a little of his face, but what she could see was overexaggerated by the beam of the flashlight, giving him a dark, almost Frankenstein-like glow that had her breath backing up in her throat.

“It’s okay,” Frankenstein said to her. “The phones go out all the time.”

Oh, okay then. She’d just forget about the panic barreling through her at the speed of light. Her plan was to at least look calm. Get what info she could. “What about the electricity?” she managed, as if asking the time that tea would be served.

After that, she hadn’t a clue.

“Yeah, that’s new,” he admitted, and shrugged as if to say he had no idea.

“Are you . . . the manager?” she asked, hoping the answer was “Yes” and not “No, I’m your murderer.”