"Karen Robards - Walking After Midnight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robards Karen)

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Memory was swamped by the emotions she had felt at that moment, which burst
through now with dazzling clarity: terror, disbelief, despair.
The water-veil cleared, and briefly she was back in the room where she had
died, floating up near the ceiling, near the self-same plant hook that had
done her in. Despite its grisly history, no one had bothered to take it
down. It still curled like a beckoning finger against the dingy plaster,
forgotten.
Why was she here? What pull was so strong that it had sucked her back from
her lazy swim through eternity?
A face flashed into her consciousness: a man, blond and handsome. Followed
by another, swarthy and roughskinned.
With the faces came a name. Her name, from the life that had ended: Deedee.
Deedee. She'd been dead, but now she was back. Not alive, but conscious.
For a purpose. One thing she had learned was that everything had a purpose.
While the purpose remained to be revealed to her, she drifted out across
the ceiling into the endless night, content to wait.
2.

Toilets were the pits. Especially men's toilets. Nasty creatures, men:
didn't they ever hit what they were aiming at?
Summer McAfee wrinkled her nose in disgust, tried not to think about just
exactly what it was she was down on her hands and knees scrubbing off the
floor, and plied her brush to the tile with a vengeance. The sooner she got
the job done, the sooner she would be out of there.
"1 can't get noon SATISFACTION . . . " Summer crooned the Rolling Stones'
thirty-year-old megahit in a throaty undertone as she worked. So she sang
off-key. So what? There was no one in the vicinity to hear. Bringing her
Walkman was a no-no on this job, so she had no choice but to rely on her
own less than musical voice for distraction. Not that it was working.
Despite the imaginary presence of the mythical Mick, she was as twitchy as
a tied horse in a barn full of flies.

"1 can't get nooo . . ."
Another lingering creak from somewhere beyond the closed door of the men's
rest room almost made Summer choke on the rest of the line. Her gaze shot
over her
4 Karen Robards

shoulder for what must have been the tenth time in a quarter of an hour. Not
that glancing around did much good. The rising Lysol vapors were so thick in
the small rest room that she could scarcely breathe, let alone see through
the tears that filmed her eyes. Maybe she'd gotten a little carried away
with the Lysol, but the men's room had been so darn filthy.
Summer had enough vision left to assure herself that the rest room door was
still solidly closed. As for what lay beyond the door-well, she just
wouldn't think about that. Whatever the creak was, it was certainly
harmless. The building was over a hundred years old; of course it was going
to creak. Harmon Brothers, a chain of funeral homes, was her struggling
cleaning service's biggest client. She was not about to blow the account