by Bonnie Vanak
Within a heartbeat, Chris brought his vehicle to a screeching halt right in front of the taller of the two teenagers. The youth fell, then quickly scrambled back up to his feet.
Fear and confusion were in both teens’ eyes.
They stared at him, not like deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, but like two deer that had seen something really, really awful.
Chris rolled down the window closest to the teens.
“Something wrong, boys?”
Neither answered him, not because they were trying to be evasive or difficult, but because neither one of them seemed able to speak. They were both struggling to catch their breath, their lungs all but bursting from their effort to put as much distance between themselves and whatever it was that they had either seen or encountered within the empty department store.
Making a judgment call, Chris turned off his engine and got out of his vehicle.
His eyes swept over the two teens, making a quick evaluation of any potential threat they might pose. This was Aurora, CA, deemed to be a normally safe city. But no place was perfect, and as his mother, Maeve, was fond of saying, even paradise had its serpent, as Adam and Eve sadly discovered.
Shorter and of slighter build than he was, the two teens didn’t seem to pose any sort of a threat. Wearing light windbreakers that had flapped wildly as they ran, the duo didn’t look to be carrying any weapons, either, concealed or otherwise.
“Take your time,” Chris told them patiently. “Catch your breath and then tell me what has you both so spooked.”
Still gasping, the shorter one pointed frantically behind him to the building he and his friend had just vacated like two fledgling bats out of hell.
Chris took the opportunity to attempt to fill in some of the blanks and coax the story out of the breathless, frightened teens.
“Kresky’s,” he said, identifying their point of exit.
The duo nodded vigorously in response, but still didn’t seem to be able to form any actual words.
In its day, Kresky’s had been an upper-end department store, a chain of shops owned and developed by a wealthy East Coast-based family more than eighty years ago. At its zenith, the stores were located in major cities in almost every state in the country. They offered everything from clothing to cookware to toys. Prices were reasonable and customers were plentiful—until they weren’t.
Once it stopped being the place where everyone shopped, the stores grew fewer in number until there were almost none left at all. The one in Aurora was among the last to give up the ghost and had just recently—four months ago, if Chris recalled correctly—held its going-out-of-business sale, before permanently closing its doors.
“What about Kresky’s?” Chris asked, following that question with another one. “And what were you two doing in the store? It’s been cleared out for months. Why would you want to break in?”
As far as he knew, that final sale had included virtually everything in the place, including the fixtures. Only the plumbing and the walls were left, a sad testimony to a once thriving store where he had accompanied Sally Howe, the love of his life his last year in high school, to pick out her senior prom dress.
Neither teen in front of him seemed to have sucked enough air into his lungs to attempt to explain why they would break into an abandoned department store. Instead, the taller of them had only two words, barely audible, to offer.
The moment Chris heard them, he realized that he wasn’t being told why they had entered the building, but why they had exited it in such a huge hurry and why their complexions had turned so pasty white in the process.
“Dead body!”
Copyright © 2017 by Marie Rydzynski-Ferrarella
ISBN-13: 9781488016295
Shielded by the Cowboy SEAL
Copyright © 2017 by Bonnie Vanak
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