The Beautiful and the Wild by Peggy Townsend EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Peggy Townsend
- Language: English
- Genre: Domestic Thrillers
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
The silence was so thick I felt like I was drowning.
It filled my ears and throat with a watery quiet that made it hard to
breathe. I leaned my forehead against the cold steel door that imprisoned
me, and willed myself to draw in small gulps of air until finally the feeling
of suffocation began to lift. It was only then that I turned to look at my
surroundings.
I was locked inside a rusted shipping container, its walls pockmarked
with tiny holes that let in slivers of light. A mildewed mattress on a low
frame sat in one corner, with a ragged upholstered chair and a steamer trunk
next to it. There was a shelf with an old-fashioned lantern on it, a small
woodstove that vented through the back wall of the space, and a cluster of
fifty-five-gallon drums in the corner near where I stood. It looked as if
someone had once lived here but had abandoned it the way people did in
ghost towns, leaving everything behind as disaster and illness struck. I
shivered and pulled my jacket tighter around me.
Gray light filtered through a high rectangular window and I pushed
myself away from the door to look.
Outside, the sky was pewter with dark clouds that scudded in the wind.
Dense stands of spruce pressed around the container. In the distance, a
muscular line of serrated mountains poked the sky. Everything here in
Alaska seemed oversized and unrestrained. Even the summer daylight had
no boundaries. I didn’t have my phone or a watch but I guessed it was after
midnight.
In front of me was a clearing that had been hacked out of the
wilderness. A small greenhouse, a couple of graying outbuildings and a
scattering of broken equipment edged the compound. A good-sized
vegetable garden had been planted in the center of the opening, although the
plants looked tired and anemic. On the far side of the garden was a sagging,
low-roofed cabin with a set of weathered antlers nailed above the door.
Yellow light spilled through the front window of the hut, illuminating a
male figure bent over a table as if performing some intricate work. He wore
a plaid flannel shirt and his golden hair was long.
He was my husband, the father of my child. A man everyone said was
dead, and yet here he was, very much alive.
He was also the one holding me prisoner.
I couldn’t help but wonder how everything had gone so wrong.
2.
THEN
I met my husband, Mark, nine years ago when I was still struggling to
find my way. I was living in Sacramento with three roommates and
waitressing at a cheap diner where the mediocre food was matched only by
the sullenness of its customers. I sometimes wondered if the meals were
what made people grumpy or whether the sourness of the customers caused
the cook to do only a halfhearted job because he knew he would never
please anybody. Either way, I felt like I needed to blow off a little steam and
decided to go to this country-and-western bar called the Holdup with
another waitress from work. Mark was the first person I saw when I walked
in.
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