Free The Moonlit Mind (Novella): A Tale of Suspense by Dean Koontz Page B

is hers alone all day and night.
    As the Phantom of Broderick’s, by night-lights on the ground floor and by flashlight on the upper three, she can shop for hours if she wishes, try on fancy dresses and other clothes that she willnever wear in the world outside, and indulge whatever fantasies this vast realm of merchandise encourages.
    In the general manager’s office on the fourth floor, there is a private bathroom in which she can shower. If she wipes it down with a squeegee afterward, the stall is dry only three hours later, and no one can know that she used it.
    The restaurant kitchen is windowless, so she can turn the lights on there to cook her meals. She usually eats at the desk in the chef-manager’s office, while reading a book.
    Reading is her favorite pastime, as it was for Daisy Jean Sims. In certain fiction, she perceives truths that she rarely finds in nonfiction; therefore, in her quest to better understand the world and the meaning of her life, she reads those novels that suggest a world of wonders, dark and light, forever unfolding for eyes willing to see.
    If she gets hungry for fresh cashews or fine chocolates, the nuts-and-candy counter on the ground floor offers a smorgasbord.
    She takes nothing but food from Broderick’s, and she pays for it by organizing tables of sweaters and pants and other clothing that the day’s shoppers have left disarranged, by better cleaning places that the store’s own maintenance crews have left less than spic-and-span, and by making sure that Eleanor’s, in particular, sparkles.
    During the fourteen months that she has lived mostly here, she has kept her tiny studio apartment as a mail drop and a place to do laundry. Her days off are Sunday and Monday, but she leaves the store only on the second of those days. Monday nights, she sleeps in her apartment, and she yearns to be once more in Broderick’s.
    She has chosen this way of living not to save money on rent, but in the hope of finding again the security that she knew before her family was slaughtered. Life on the streets has toughened her, but it has not restored the sense of stability and permanence that she once enjoyed.
    Perhaps even Broderick’s can’t give her back that most precious aspect of her childhood. But alone within its walls, she feels safer than she feels elsewhere. Except on those occasions when Crispin pays a visit, her only company is who she meets in books, as well as, in various clothing departments, a community of mannequins, none of whom can rob her of her virginity or kill her. She enjoys over 380,000 square feet of living space, surely the largest home in the world, and the longer she lives here without incident, the more easily she can make herself believe that this place is not merely a home but also a fortress.
    The first time Crispin sneaked into Broderick’s with his dog, before closing time, he might not have made it safely through the morning without setting off an alarm or being caught on his way out. Thanks to Amity Onawa, he now knows how to come and go with almost as much stealth as the spirit of a nine-times-dead cat.
    And now here they are, friends for almost a year, and except for Harley, each of them is the other’s only confidant.…
    Over the final little cakes, Amity says, “I saw your mother at tea with some women about two weeks ago.”
    “What—here?”
    “At that table,” she says, pointing.
    “I thought you worked in the kitchen.”
    “Sometimes now, if a waitress drops out of a shift at the last minute, I take her tables.”
    “What did you think of her?”
    “She’s even more beautiful than her pictures. And very sure of herself.”
    “Don’t ever serve her again,” Crispin warns. “Serving one of them in any way … well, it gives them a hook in you, I think. They can pull you into further and darker service as if you’re a fish on a line.”
    “I don’t believe I’d be that easy. Anyway, I doubt I’ll ever have another chance to serve her.