Dead Giveaway

It wasn’t on forbidden cha

Betty smiled as she switched to cha

Her secret friend had thrown a rope over a beam on the ceiling. Now he was tying a loop in one end and hooking it around the fu

Betty knew that there was something very frightening about all the movies she’d seen lately. It had to do with the forbidden cha

Her frown changed to a smile as she pressed the button for forbidden cha

“Slippers!” Betty was so delighted she said the word out loud. The doll-lady was very generous. She’d given Betty the big patchwork doll, so she could have company now that Jack wasn’t here. Maybe, if she could remember the words, the doll-lady would let her wear the fuzzy bu

Betty reached for the notepad by the side of her bed and wrote down a B for bu

She worked very hard at the drawing and when she’d finished, she had a good picture, almost as good as a photograph. She circled the things, she’d forgotten their names already, and put in the mark that meant question. Now all she had to do was show it to the doll-lady.

She stared at the picture for a moment and then frowned, vaguely recalling that young children wore things like these. Was she too old to have them? She glanced down at her hands. She’d heard Nurse say that her job was like taking care of a big baby, but hers were adult hands. How did people judge age if they couldn’t remember birthdays?

Betty searched her mind for the answer. If she had been a horse, she could have gone to the mirror and looked at her teeth. Horse traders could tell an animal’s age by checking its teeth. Never look a gift horse in the mouth. It was clever if you knew what it meant.

Then a fu

At a sound outside her door, Betty switched off the television set. Then she pulled up the blankets and closed her eyes so the Nurse-bird would think she was sleeping when she came in to do the bed check.

SIXTEEN

Walker moved close enough to recognize Alan and Laureen stretched out on the lounge chairs. Alan was sleeping on his stomach, snoring softly, and he looked very uncomfortable. Laureen was on her back with the blanket pulled up to her chin, as if she were taking the air on the deck of a cruise ship.

He studied their sleeping faces for a moment. Walker couldn’t blame them for fleeing their own apartment. Dead bodies made him uncomfortable, too. He’d never grown used to seeing the slack features and wide-open eyes staring up at nothing. Sometimes there was a surprised look, a perplexed expression, or a grimace that didn’t quite fade as death froze the features into a mask.

Walker’d had several close encounters and he had the scars to prove it, a six-inch knife cut that had nearly spilled his guts out on the ground, and a shoulder wound that still twinged whenever it was about to rain. Usually it didn’t bother him, but there were times like tonight when he wanted out. They’d offered to let him retire after this job, but now that his family was gone, there was really no reason to take them up on it.

Some people accepted death as inevitable. Others sought all sorts of ways to ensure immortality, like spending a fortune to be preserved at subzero temperatures and thawed when modern medicine had found the cure for their fatal disease. Walker had decided that he’d be better off ignoring death and living each day as it came, which seemed to work just fine until something happened to remind him that his luck couldn’t last forever.

Many might argue that his luck was relative. Walker had lost his wife and his six-year-old daughter in an auto accident. At least that was what he’d told people, omitting that the accident involved a bomb under the hood of his car. If you had good protection, they moved on to your family.

As Walker reached out to press the elevator button, his hand was trembling. His still got the shakes every time he thought about that morning, five years ago. The phone had rung at eight o’clock, just as Je

“I’ll get it, hon.” Cheryl had sprinted across the floor to grab it before he’d even pushed back his chair. She’d been a long-distance ru

“He did? Right next to his eye? That sounds nasty, Mavis.” Cheryl had held the phone with one hand and refilled his coffee cup with the other. “It’s not really serious, is it?”

Walker had studied the furrow that appeared on his wife’s forehead and sighed. Definitely a problem.

“Of course.” Cheryl’s voice had been very sympathetic. “We’ll just switch weeks, all right? And tell Da

Cheryl had hung up the phone and poured herself a cup of coffee. Then she’d flopped down in a chair and sighed. “Da

“Sure, no problem.” Walker had agreed immediately, even though he hated to drive Cheryl’s bug. When rust spots had appeared on her lime-green car, she’d covered them up with flower decals. From a distance, it looked polka-dotted, which was bad enough, but when people got a close look at the pink and purple and yellow daisies, they smirked.

Cheryl had laughed and Walker had known she was reading his mind. “Sorry, hon. I know how you feel, but I can’t cram six first graders into the bug, and there’s no time to run over to get Mom’s station wagon.”