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

allergic.” She was already saying far, far too much. But insanely, she needed Luke’s reassurance.

“Did he get sick?”

“No. Not that I know of. I’m just worried that I’m forgetting things, I guess. That I’ve become forgetful.”

He squeezed her arm. “You do seem a little overwrought, Hannah. You need to be gentle on yourself, though. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes.” Luke frowned, looking around her apartment, taking in the mess on her countertop. “Look, you just seem like you’ve been under a lot of stress lately. You quit your job, and you’re starting your own business. All that is stressful. And I know how the sleep situation is—I only have Nora two nights a week, and I’m exhausted, even though I’m not with her as much as you are. I’m going to cancel my meeting, and I’ll help you tidy up here while you take a nap. You can’t keep getting three hours of sleep a night and expect to still function. You’re bound to make mistakes in that state. Let’s get you some rest, okay?”

A fat tear rolled down her cheek. Yes, and she had made a huge freaking mistake, hadn’t she?

From this point on, she was going to make changes. She’d be the perfect mom.

“Thank you, Luke.”

As she crossed to her bedroom, her mind burned with a vision of how Peter would look now, at the bottom of Fresh Pond.

But she was going to sleep—just like Luke said. And after this, she was going to pull herself together.

Thirty-One

The stench hit Michael hard before he got anywhere near the police tape, and he regretted the blintzes he’d eaten for both breakfast and lunch… He’d been thinking about Russian pancakes a lot lately, so he’d made them for himself.

But now, as he trudged off the path and through the mud toward the pond’s edge and the pervasive smell of decay, all the creamy ricotta seemed like a terrible mistake. The unusually intense June heat didn’t help the situation, nor did the strong wind that whipped off the pond in his direction, carrying the scent of death.

As he moved closer to the pond’s edge, his gaze darted to Ciara, dwarfed within the circle of crime scene tape. She crouched near the body, strangely still, her head cocked. When she turned to look at him, he noticed her cheeks had flushed in the humid air.

For some reason, his attention was so focused on her that he nearly missed everything else. The young prosecutor, looking uncomfortable in his suit. The diminutive coroner—Linda—speaking into a small recorder; the police photographer snapping shots of a bloated body. The victim’s face ravaged by the bottom of the pond…

Bloody hell.

He wondered how long he’d been down there. Michael pulled his eyes away from the body, shifting his gaze out to the water, trying to master his nausea. Ducks floated serenely, drifting by on the gentle water as if nothing were amiss.

As he approached the crime scene tape, a uniformed officer named Jeff handed him a clipboard. Michael quickly signed in, then grabbed a pair of gloves from a box on the ground and pulled them on. He ducked under the tape.

Ciara looked up at him from where she crouched. “A jogger found him. He just drifted on to shore. The wind blew him in this way, so we don’t know where he entered the pond. But we haven’t had any missing person reports fitting his description the past few days.”

Michael looked him over. Apart from his face, there were no obvious signs of trauma—no gunshot wounds, stab wounds.

The clothes gave the impression of youth. He wore a black T-shirt, jeans, and sandals. Michael just had no idea who he was.

Michael crouched down, tilting his head at a bit of brown leather sticking out of the man’s pocket. With a gloved hand, he carefully pulled out a wallet. When he opened it, he found a Harvard University ID card showing the face of a man of about thirty-five. Handsome, glasses, grinning from ear to ear.

A sense of sadness pressed on Michael’s chest like wet soil.

“Peter Sylvestro,” Ciara read over his shoulder.

It rang distantly familiar in the hollows of his mind. Had he seen that name somewhere?

“How did he end up here?” Michael whispered to himself. Then he looked up at the coroner—but not very far up, because she was only about five feet tall. “Do we have any idea how long he was down there yet?”

“I don’t know exactly. Given the state of decomposition and the water’s temperature, I’d estimate maybe four or five days. Looks like he was submerged, face down by the bottom of the pond, and some of the rocks ripped up his face. After a few days, the gases building up in his body would have forced him up again. I don’t know the cause of death yet, obviously.”

Michael rose and crossed over to the edge of the pond, looking out over the rippling water. Maybe Peter had been drunk or high, and stumbled into the pond, drowning accidentally. It wouldn’t be the first time it had happened to someone from one of the universities—except that in those cases, they’d been reported missing, because whomever they’d been drinking with would have noticed they didn’t make it home.

“Michael? Michael?”

It took him a moment to realize Ciara was saying his name, and he turned to look her. She blew a ginger curl out of her eyes.

“I spoke to campus security. Peter Sylvestro was an associate professor in the education department. He reported his laptop stolen from his office last week.”

It was after nine by the time Michael got home to make his dinner, and by then he could hardly think straight because of his hunger. He found himself leaning against the doorframe of his small kitchen, staring at an unopened bottle of Shiraz on his marble countertop. His eyes swept around the space—the dark wood cabinets, the bare walls painted an antique grey, the counters clean except for his bowl of onions and garlic.

Usually, his