Influenced Eva Robinson (polar express read aloud .TXT) 📖

A wiry man with pale skin poked his head in the door from across the room. “You didn’t get me any lunch? I’m hurt.” He grinned, then closed the door.

Michael let out an audible sigh.

“Charles?” asked Ciara.

Michael shrugged. “Everyone calls me Charles.”

“Why?”

Michael scratched his forehead. “They think it sounds particularly English, I think. Like Prince Charles.”

She swallowed a mouthful of spicy tofu. “That’s stupid as f—” She stopped herself. Be lovelier. “That’s stupid.”

“You and I are the only ones who think that.”

“If we’re going to give you a patronizing English nickname, how about Cromwell? Did you know he took all the Maypoles down in London? Killed the theaters too. Burned a bunch of Catholics in a church. He was terrible.”

“You know, I don’t really like that any better, funnily enough.”

“Well, you don’t get to choose your own nickname.” Lovelier, Ciara. “You know what, forget that. We were talking about Arabella. What did her husband say when you spoke to him on the phone?”

“He mentioned the laptop theft. He called her paranoid, hysterical about it. Maybe psychotic. She thought people were after her. Paranoia lined up a little with my impressions of her, but she didn’t seem mentally ill. Her language was focused and logical. She seemed distraught to me, but not mentally disorganized.”

“Maybe her paranoia was justified.” Ciara leaned back in her chair. “Don’t you think it’s a bit strange that the guy calls his recently deceased wife psychotic?”

“I’m trying to keep an open mind until I meet him.”

“Of course. But it seems…” Ciara’s taste buds were exploding with garlic and chili peppers, and sweat beaded on her forehead. She tended to order the hottest dish possible—the ones with the five chili peppers symbol. And China Express had succeeded in bringing her a dish that gave her a true endorphin rush, burning the inside of her mouth with a euphoric surge. “It seems insensitive to point it out that way. And let’s not forget he works in a chemistry lab, where they’re experts in toxic substances.”

“Of course he’s a suspect. Statistically, as her husband, he’s the person most likely to hurt her. We know that. No known history of domestic violence in his case, but he’s still the most likely. And psychosis would be immediately obvious to everyone around her. Her advisor would have seen signs of it. It would show up in her writing. Delusions, grandiosity, schizophasia—”

Ciara’s eyebrows rose. “I don’t even know what that is. Why do you sound like you could be teaching a class in this topic?”

“Schizophasia is word salad. Using words because they rhyme or have some other tangential associations rather than conveying something meaningful.”

“Okay. How do you know that?”

“Med school dropout. I wanted to be a psychiatrist at one point.”

She had a million more questions now. Why leave medical school? Why come to the U.S. in the first place? But if he’d wanted her to know, he probably would have volunteered the information.

She turned back to the laptop. Forcing herself to focus, she narrowed her eyes at the photo of Rowan and Arabella in the library. It was hard to reconcile the image of Arabella in the photo—wispy-haired and ethereal, angelic—with someone dying alone in a hospital room, vomiting herself to death.

If she’d been poisoned, one of two things had led her there: the mental anguish that would lead a person to take her own life, or a complete and utter betrayal, probably by someone she knew. That level of human suffering—whether it was evil or despair—had to leave behind a presence.

Michael sighed. “I should have waited until I was done eating before going through the autopsy report again.”

Ciara slid her container of tofu onto his desk. “Try this, then. It’s one hundred percent corpse-free.”

“You make it sound so delightful the way you describe it. You should be in food marketing.” Despite his sarcasm, he speared a square of tofu. After one bite, his eyes started watering, and he clamped his hand over his mouth. He snatched his glass of water off the table.

“I forgot to mention the chili peppers,” said Ciara. “I forgot English people only like bland food.”

And there it was, Ciara thought. Her unfailing ability to make people dislike her by revealing her distinctly unlovely personality.

Well, it didn’t matter. She was good at her job, and that was why they’d hired her. Not to make friends. Even if she couldn’t always explain her reasoning, her instincts were on point.

While Michael coughed and chugged down a pint of water, she turned back to Rowan’s Instagram. As Ciara browsed through the photos, a pattern started to emerge in her mind. One person had liked every single one of Rowan’s photos: Adam Green, Arabella’s husband.

And even more interesting, he’d left a heart emoji on her nude—after his wife had died.

“Michael. I don’t think Adam is particularly upset about his wife’s death. In fact, I think he has something of a crush.”

Thirteen

Well into her second bottle of wine, Rowan stared at Arabella’s Facebook wall, at the stream of tributes that flooded her page.

Arabella—miss you forever xoxo

Gone too soon, Bella.

Even in the middle of the night, photos were popping up every few moments—Arabella at her graduation from Oxford, hugging a friend on a city street, standing on a hill overlooking a city, wearing a long floral dress. Rowan supposed it was morning already in the U.K.

Rowan found herself shaking, but the tears weren’t streaming down her cheeks like they should be. It wasn’t grief she felt—something more like fear. When she closed her eyes, her mind flooded with images of death—grey skin, blue lips, veins vivid beneath pale skin. Arabella’s face, the color of ashes. The people she admired would wither and die around her…

It seemed beauty should be a shield against death, but it wasn’t, was it?

The Harvard Crimson hadn’t said how she’d died. Already Rowan had texts from friends: Do you think it was suicide?

Her mind flashed with the image of her own lips, a greyish-purple color. Fear slid through her veins at