Free The Astronaut's Wife by Robert Tine Page B

discharged from the armed forces.
    “I assure you,” Reese was saying, “this will hardly take a moment of your time, Commander, and it could be quite important. For the future of the program and the agency.” Reese knew there was no better way to get an old astronaut to cooperate than to run the old space program flag up the mast.
    But it did not work with Spencer Armacost. At least, not this time, anyway.
“I appreciate your concern, Mr. Reese,” said
Spencer evenly, “but I have been poked with more than enough needles to last me a lifetime, you understand. And your superiors have given me a clean bill of health. That’s good enough for me.”
Reese nodded vigorously. “I know they have, Commander. I know they have. It’s probably nothing at all, but I think it would make sense to have—”
Spencer’s eyes narrowed and he looked at Reese with a certain amount of suspicion. “Tell me, do your bosses know that you want to ‘do this? Does the Director know? Or is this a purely extra curricular activity on your part, Mr. Reese?”
Reese looked at the floor and shook his head slowly. “No one knows about this. No one but me. And now you, of course.” He looked up and directly into Spencer’s eyes. “And I’m sure I can count on your discretion in this matter, can’t I?”
“Of course,” said Spencer with a thin smile..
As he spoke the lights in the house blinked off and then after a second or two blinked on again. There was a loud, fast zapping noise and the acrid smell of smoke from an electrical fire.
“Fuse?” someone wondered aloud. There were a couple of seconds of silence, which was immediately dispelled by the loud, high-pitched sound of a little girl screaming. She was upstairs.
Jill dropped the glass in her hand and dashed for the stairs. The screaming was coming from the bathroom at the end of the hail. She pushed open the door and saw a little girl—maybe eight or nine years old—standing in the doorway. She was frozen in place by fear, staring at something horrible at the far end of the bathroom.
Natalie Streck was standing in front of the sink, both faucets gushing water into an overflowing basin, water splashing to the tile floor. Both of Natalie's hands were in the sink, her hands wrapped like claws around the cheap radio, the one from her bedroom. The radio that she said had spoken incessantly to her dead husband. It was as if she was trying to drown the thing.
A power cord led from an electrical outlet into the sink. Natalie’s body was trembling, her hair on end, a crackle and fizzle at the corners of her mouth, her eyes wide. Natalie was dead, electrocuted by the radio that she said had killed her husband.
Almost in a trance, Jillian took a step closer to the horrible sight. The little girl continued to scream. But Jillian heard her name loud and clear over the shrieking of the child.
“Jillian! Look out!” Spencer grabbed her and pulled her back from the pool of electrified water in the middle of the bathroom floor. She had almost stepped in it and joined her friend in a horrible death. It had been so close and she had not even realized it.
Natalie still stood, her dead eyes staring into the mirror. The little girl continued to scream. Jillian gaped at the scene. It would be a long time before she forgot those eyes and the sound of that scream.

8
    Jillian Armacost had had her doubts about Spencer leaving NASA and the two of them leaving Florida, particularly for a destination like New York City. But with the deaths of Alex and Natalie Streck, each grotesque in its own, unique way, she knew she could not stay there any longer. The place was haunted for her now, and perhaps a radical change of place and style of living might be enough to banish the bad memories and the hellish images.
    And yet New York was quite a stretch. There were two fundamental problems to deal with. First off, the city itself—the noise, the confusion, the polyglot population—was disconcerting at first,