The Deadly Rose — Miriam Lynch

THE DEADLY ROSE

A desperate impulse to escape an unhappy romance sent Paula Stanhope fleeing down an unfamiliar road. She instictively recoiled from the monstrous, evil looking old house at its end, but she needed help.

She could not know that her innocent request to use the telephone would imprison her in a nightmare world of terror, at the mercy of madwomen who had no intention of letting her leave alive…..


“You'll be safe here. I'll come back for you after I've managed to find a way out for us.”

Then he was gone. I was terrified at being left alone in that dreadful black hole, but I knew that if we were ever to escape from this madhouse alive, I had to stay where I was, to wait for the man I loved to come for me.

I waited and I waited and I waited. Time passed, a great deal of it, and my ears strained for the sound of Adam's footsteps on the stairs.

He had been gone much too long. And there, in my dark solitude, the knowledge struck me with stunning force. I remembered Jennifer. And Adam. I thought of them separately at first and then as a pair, together.

And I knew that Adam was not going to come back…