In the Blink of an Eye Read Online Free Page A

momentarily stealing his breath, his voice.
    â€œPaine, it’s Iris. I found her this morning. She’s dead.”
    F IVE MINUTES LATER, Julia hangs up the telephone. Her legs nearly giving way beneath her, she sinks shakily into the chair beside the desk in Iris’s small second-floor study and buries her tear-swollen face in her hands.
    It’s been more than two hours, but she can’t stop reliving what happened. Describing it in the stilted conversation with Paine Landry didn’t help to calm her frazzled nerves.
    Again, she envisions the gruesome scene she discovered in the bathroom down the hall.
    Iris, facedown in the full bathtub, her naked body dangling over the edge, her legs sprawled across the tile floor behind her.
    Julia knew instinctively that she was dead even before she touched her hard flesh.
    A freak accident, the paramedics said. She must have slipped on the wet tile as she was getting into her bath. She fell forward, hit her head on the edge of the tub. Unconscious, she toppled face-first into the water and drowned.
    A freak accident.
    Drowned.
    Just like Kristin.
    Julia’s hands flutter to her lap, then back to her face. She’s trembling, her entire body quaking at the unimaginable horror of Iris’s death, and Kristin’s death before hers.
    Her breath is shallow, audible. The only other sound in the room—in the house—is the antique clock ticking loudly in the parlor at the foot of the stairs.
    The old house is empty now, after the flurry of activity that kicked into motion when Julia ran shrieking from the house.
    It was Pilar who dialed 911.
    And it was Pilar who accompanied Iris—Iris’s body, Julia amends—when they took her away. Somebody had to go, and somebody had to stay behind, to call Paine and tell him that his daughter’s grandmother was dead.
    Of course Julia volunteered. Pilar, after all, is a virtual stranger to Paine and Dulcie.
    So is Julia, really. She only met them once, when they came east for Kristin’s memorial service. They were all so caught up in raw grief during the week they were here that she barely remembers speaking to Paine, who spent most of the time silent, remote, lost in anguish.
    But Dulcie . . .
    Julia bonded with Dulcie during those muggy, gray August days.
    Her heart tightens at the memory of Kristin’s beautiful child—a child who was blinded as a toddler after a harrowing bout with meningitis.
    So much tragedy in one family.
    And now this.
    The phone call was as difficult as she had expected. His voice tight with emotion, Paine promised Julia that he and Dulcie would be here as soon as they could. When he asked her about funeral arrangements, Julia pointed out that he would most likely be in charge of that. After all, Dulcie is Iris’s only descendent, aside from her stepson Edward. As far as Julia knows, Iris hasn’t seen him in the three years since he showed up, stone-faced and distant, for Kristin’s memorial service.
    Suddenly weary, Julia leans her head against the high, upholstered back of the chair, her eyes closed.
    Then she feels it.
    Startled, she picks up her head, poised, listening.
    She isn’t alone in the house.
    There is nothing to hear. No rush of sound, no distorted snatch of a voice.
    Yet the presence is here, around her, tangible.
    Her eyes still closed, she concentrates, struggling to make contact.
    Who are you?
    Iris?
    Kristin?
    Who is it? Who’s here?
    The energy is gone as swiftly as it made itself known.
    Shaken, Julia rises from the chair and makes her way quickly down the stairs and out the front door, instinctively needing to get away—before it comes back.

Chapter Two
    â€œ H OW MUCH FURTHER, Daddy?”
    Paine glances at Dulcie, curled up in the backseat of the rental car, a braille storybook open on her lap. He notices that her pigtails are uneven. He’d tried to do them as her baby-sitter back home does, but a big loop of