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

“No, Ciara. Not even a little.” It was the favorite lie he told himself—that superstitions weren’t for him.

“I’m not sure I believe it either. But what if I told you that the street Stella lived on was named after an accused witch?” Ciara asked. “Goody Kendall. And she was executed where you live, so I don’t even want to know what’s in store for you.” She flashed him a small smile.

“Anything is possible.” He frowned at her. “How are you doing?”

Ciara pulled her gaze away from him, staring out at the yard. “She looked like my twin sister.” The wind toyed with her fiery curls, and silence pressed down on them.

“You mentioned that before. It disturbed you during the interview.” He knew there was more to this.

“When I was seventeen,” she said, “she was found dead in the old cemetery near our apartment. It was called Ye Olde Burial Ground. It’s the old Puritan cemetery in Lexington. The oldest graves faced east so people could rise as soon as the apocalypse started, and there are carvings on the stones…” She trailed off again, her eyes down. “That’s where Jess shot herself in the head, apparently. And she lay there all night, till I found her the next morning. So when I went up the stairs, I thought Stella looked just like Jess, all grown up. I was getting confused, thinking it was her. I see flashes of it, a lot. I see the graveyard everywhere I go. Skulls, gaping eyes. Like the skulls that were looking over Jess’s body. And it turns out I see them when I should be seeing cartoon cats.”

Michael’s throat tightened. “You said apparently? She ‘apparently’ shot herself?”

She shrugged. “That’s what they said. But I never saw it coming. I didn’t know she was depressed. But that’s what they say happened. The gun had her fingerprints on it, so… Anyway, it was a long time ago. And Stella isn’t Jess. Stella was a murderer, and she wanted to kill us. She shot you. She was going to shoot me.”

“How much do you think Luke was in control?”

“Stella had a whole history of white-collar crime. But he knew exactly how to get her to do what he wanted. He wanted her to get rid of the witnesses. Because if there were no witnesses left, then he could try to get Stella to take the fall. And he was whispering to her, pushing all the right buttons. He was saying, ‘Your name will be in the papers; everyone will know what you did.’ Because that’s what really terrified her, being pilloried in public. And he knew it.”

“The shame of it all was worse than murder, I guess. Worse than not seeing her kids ever again.”

Here, with the sun streaming over the red brick, it was hard not to think about Rowan. In her post that night, she’d written,

A writer who is a ghost. A dead writer. Bloated, grey, skin that turns into bone.

“Maybe I get why Stella was so desperate to avoid the ignominy.”

Ciara blew a curl out of her eyes. “The what?”

“The disgrace. I once read that when people endure enough shame, they can develop the sense that they’re dying, and that’s why we say ‘mortified.’ It’s a medical term, too, for dead flesh. We die of shame, die of embarrassment. That was what Rowan felt like. Like she was already dead.”

A line formed between Ciara’s brows. “Well, that’s what they say happened to Jess.” She cleared her throat. “Never mind. We should get to work.”

He had a million questions he wanted to ask, all her stories he wanted to uncover—but he could wait.

Forty-Four

Hannah leaned back in the folding chair, looking up at a darkening sky of periwinkle and rose. Evening was falling over Arlington. Mosquitos were buzzing around her head, but she didn’t want the warm August night to end. Nor did she want to attempt to stand and use her crutches.

After three months, she’d only just got the braces off, but metal screws still held her legs together. Yet none of that had been as painful as the three months she’d just spent with her mother.

At last, she’d gotten a reprieve—she was taking a one-week vacation at Daniel’s house. Then it would be back to her mom’s for a while.

She closed her eyes, feeling for a moment like she was falling again, the world ripped out from under her with nothing but darkness around her. She gripped the arms of the lawn chair to steady herself as vertigo slammed into her.

When the bullet hit her, it had knocked her backward over the railing. The fall had seemed to stretch on forever—the feeling of plummeting through a void in complete solitude. In those moments before she hit the ground, she was sure she’d already died and gone to hell.

When she landed, the pain had shot up her legs. Terrible as it was, it was a relief. At least she’d known she was alive.

She was lucky, too, that Stella had only managed to hit her in the arm. Stella, for all her perfection in other areas, was a terrible shot. She’d been panicking so much that she could no longer shoot straight.

Hannah’s bullet wound had healed long before her shattered legs.

She glanced at the back of Daniel’s house—a little Georgian house, butter yellow with black shutters. Three stone angels jutted from the garden, their wings covered in moss and lichens.

An old wooden fence encircled the yard, climbing with pale roses.

The door swung open and Daniel stepped outside, holding two mojitos.

“Nora’s finally asleep.”

“You’re very good at that, Daniel.”

He sat in the chair next to her. “I told her about my next sculpture and she just passed out.”

Hannah took a deep breath. If her legs weren’t still shattered, she’d get up to watch Nora sleeping. Nothing in the world made Hannah happier than peering over Nora’s crib to watch her clutching her blanket as she slept.

Every time she thought of Luke, a