Free 77 Shadow Street by Dean Koontz

nonsense. All her life, Edna believed in everything unlikely, from palm-reading to poltergeists, from the lost continent of Atlantis to cities on the dark side of the moon. At the moment, she was sitting at the kitchen table with Sally, plying the shaken woman with brandy-laced coffee to quiet her nerves and encouraging her to remember—or invent—new details of her encounter with the Prince of Darkness in the butler’s pantry.
    Sometimes Martha marveled that she and Edna, being different in so many ways, had built a major business together with so few moments of friction over the years. Martha had a head for business, and Edna was the creator of ever more delicious recipes. Cupp Sisters Cakes became the largest mail-order dessert company in the nation, produced a highly successful line of frozen cakes on sale in supermarkets, and in general rode every wave in the cake business to greater success. The only thing they didn’t see coming was, ironically, the upscale-cupcake craze; none of the many franchised cupcake stores bore the Cupp name. Martha supposed they succeeded because their talents were different but complementary—and because they adored each other.
    The company had been sold four years previously, and they had given away half their fortune. Thus far retirement was enjoyable, a series of luncheons and social events, volunteer work with their favorite charities, and plenty of free time to pursue their personal interests. But now this episode with dear Sally. Although Edna was the superstitious one, Martha could not shake the uneasy feeling that with this peculiar incident, her long run of good fortune—and her sister’s—might be near an end.
    As though in prophetic confirmation of that thought, the sky swung another series of bright blades. The city, like a chopping block, seemed to shudder from the impacts, the countless briefly silvered raindrops stuttering down the dusk in a stroboscopic dazzle.
    In the window glass, Martha’s reflected image flickered, as if the life force in her might be near the end of its wick. She suffered from a fear of death that she struggled always to repress, a dread that dated from the night that her first husband, Simon, passed away, when she had been forty-one. The inspiration for her fear was not Simon’s death but an incident that occurred shortly thereafter, which for the past thirty-nine years she had been able neither to explain nor forget.
    When the doorbell rang, Smoke and Ashes turned their heads but did not deign to leave their cushioned perches to welcome the caller.
    In the open doorway, Bailey Hawks greeted Martha with a kiss on the cheek. As he crossed the threshold into the foyer, her anxiety diminished. He was the kind of man to whom she’d never been attracted in her youth: quiet, competent, a good listener, a steady ship in any storm. For reasons she had never quite understood, even into middle age, she had been drawn to weak men with sparkling personalities, who were always entertaining and, in the end, always disappointing. Well, she had done all right in spite of having married one man-child and then another; but it was comforting to have a friend like Bailey when your housekeeper started ranting about seeing the devil between the china cabinets and the silver closet.
    “I don’t know whether to call a medical doctor or psychiatrist,” she said to Bailey, “but I refuse to call an exorcist.”
    “Where’s Sally?”
    “In the kitchen with Edna. By now my sister will have convinced herself that she, too, saw the apparition and that it had a forked tongue just like a snake.”
    Edna cared about decor far more than did her sister, and so Martha lived with the consequences of Edna’s passion for all things Victorian: chesterfield sofas upholstered in midnight-blue mohair, side tables draped with velvet and crocheted overlays, étagères full of porcelain birds, floral-fabric walls in original William Morris patterns, everything trimmed with ornate