Free Nigh - Book 1 by Marie Bilodeau Page B

Mrs.
Gallaway suffered from a nasty combination of insomnia, loneliness
and chattiness. Alva was tired and doubted this “gentleman caller”
was looking for more than to try and sell her a new set of kitchen
knives. Not that she’d really know what to do with those.
    “Thanks, Mrs. Gallaway.” Alva perked up her voice
and looked off with a dreamy look in her eyes. “I’ll go dress in my
ball gown now and wait for my prince charming!”
    Mrs. Gallaway cackled and waved Alva off as she
closed her door, her laughter assailed by coughs. Alva grinned and
put the key in the deadbolt. She turned it, but the familiar
releasing thunk didn’t occur.
    Could she have forgotten to set it? No, of course
not. Locking the deadbolt was second nature.
    She backed away, placing her keys between her
fingers for a quick, easy weapon. Crude, but capable of inflicting
lots of damage if necessary. She wasn’t weak and knew she could put
up a fight. Unless they had a gun, of course, and blew her head off
before she could reach them. But in her little town, that wasn’t
too likely to happen.
    Her feet firmly planted, she opened the door
carefully. If anyone was in her apartment, they knew she was here
now. Changing her tactic, she slammed the door open in case someone
waited for her behind it. The door bounced off the wall and she
caught it with her booted foot, quickly turning to face the
kitchen. It was empty, but someone had opened all of the drawers.
She thought of stepping back and calling the cops, but she was
already here and if those bastards were still here, she wanted to
give them a piece of her mind. And fists.
    She ignored the barely used kitchen, which she kept
clean and sparse. It was definitely empty. She turned back to the
corridor and faced her living room/dining room/bedroom — a rather
small room for its multiple purposes.
    No one was there. The lights were all switched on,
casting large shadows on her scattered belongings. They’d been
there in the past two hours, after the sun had set. She stepped
over her stuff and reached the converted closet Pete used for her
room. It was also in shambles, her books scattered. Alva picked up
her sister’s favourite books on legends and myths, relieved they
weren’t damaged, and carefully placed them back on the small wall
shelf.
    “Some handsome man,” she mumbled. Mrs. Gallaway
meant well, but she’d probably mentioned more than she should have,
hoping Alva finally had a “suitor.” Damn thieves, too lazy to get
jobs, yet skilled enough to pick a deadbolt without having to break
down the door. Not that they’d have found anything of value here,
except…
    Alva crossed the living room quickly to the train
set lining the back wall. It was old and too broken to be of any
worth to even collectors, but it had been her dad’s when he was a
boy, and it was the only thing they had left of him, save for the
one thing she kept hidden in the small tollbooth station. She
reached carefully across the dilapidated pine trees, the bear
figure with the missing forepaws, and the faded crosswalk signal,
and popped the top off the little tollbooth. It was meant to go
with a car set and not on a train track, but her father had loved
it so much that every time the train went around the tracks, it had
to stop to pay the toll.
    “Popular with the customers, I bet that was!” He
laughed when he showed her, when it had been just the three of them
in a small, but not as small, apartment. Her long, oil-stained
fingers reached in and grazed cold metal. She let out a short sigh
in relief.
    She rolled her fingers around the metal and gently
clasped the top, pulling free the old watch her father had given
her, his grandmother’s watch, the only item of value they had. “If
we need to, we’ll pawn it. It’s gotta be worth something, but
still, old gram would be disappointed…”
    He’d shake his head and place it back after showing
it to her. The only other time she’d seen it was when he looked