Free Dead Dreams by Emma Right

sigh. Who was the boyfriend she’d kept secret? Red truck man? Why the secrecy? She’d always been forthright about her love interests, or so I’d thought: several boyfriends in high school, and even one in West Virginia who’d cried buckets when she’d left for California. What business was she referring to? Her trust fund? It couldn’t possibly be the coal business her family was in. She detested its implications too much and hardly spoke of it.
    It sounded like she rummaged in her purse, or her Louis Vuitton backpack, and then her feet padded across the carpet. Then water in the shower splashed into the stall. She must have been preparing for a shower.
    Once she stepped into the shower, I could sneak out and lock her bedroom door by pressing the button on the doorknob. She’d never know I’d been here.
    But, who had she been talking to?



Chapter Eighteen
     
    If I could get a hold of her phone, I could memorize the number and do a reverse lookup on the Internet. I’ve had my issue with some of these online people-lookup services as my mother became a victim of identity theft a few months back. It was so easy to find a person’s credit card number, and a quick Google on the victim’s name will bring up the phone number and billing address, enough for identity thieves to put two and two together. But I figured I had a valid cause to use the service.
    Sarah hummed a tune. “Fluer-de-lis.” I remembered practicing it on the piano years ago as a kid. The shower stall door clicked shut. I peeped out from the closet. Sarah hadn’t shut the bathroom door. Figured. Thank goodness, the stall door was the frosty glass-type; she couldn’t see me even if she peered out from it.
    I tiptoed out of the closet and glanced at the bedspread, now nicely taut. Where had she tossed her iPhone? An array of glossy paper bags of varying colors and sizes lay next to her pillows. Someone had been busy shopping her heart out. Her purse, a companion to her LV backpack, lay on the dresser. I unzipped the flap on the LV. No iPhone in there. If I could just get my hands on that phone. But, I’d already pushed luck too far. Sarah zipped through everything, and she could be done with her shower in seconds. I rushed to the door and slipped out to the living room hallway. I hadn’t noticed if her door was locked but depressed the button on the doorknob anyway before I pulled it closed behind me.
    “Brianna? Is that you?” Sarah called from her bathroom. That was close. Had she seen me?
    I tripped over to my bedroom, and quickly but quietly shut my bedroom door. If she opened my door she’d find me asleep, and she might think she was just imagining noises. My bedroom was terribly chilly. The window was ajar since I had to jump into bed quickly. I slipped between the covers and closed my eyes. Just in the nick, too.
    “Brie?” She ambled in without bothering to knock, as was her habit. Her bare footsteps shuffled toward me and stopped at the bottom of my bed.
    “Hi,” I said, slowly “waking” up and squinted at her.
    She was wrapped in her white plush towel and was drying her hair with an equally lavish one . Egyptian cotton, she’d told me when I’d commented about how soft her towels felt. “You up? How come you’re home so early?”
    “I’m sick.” That much was true.
    She sat on the edge of my bed. “I’m not surprised. With your window wide open? You’re trying to set up an insectarium in our home?”
    “Ha-ha. It was stuffy when I got back.”
    She fidgeted and sat closer to me. “You smell of Hanae Mori.”
    “Hannah who?”
    “My perfume. They gave you a free sachet at Nordstrom?”
    Would Nordstrom hand out free perfume samples to someone dressed like me? Hair in a perpetual pony-tail, wisps flying around, and yoga pants that are not even Lulu-Lemon’s. I wanted to say this, but instead I asked, “Where’ve you been?”
    “Now, that is a long story, and it actually involves you.” She winked at