Free The Vanishing Season by Jodi Lynn Anderson

sometimes had to just tune her out.
    At times like this, she missed Chicago, its largeness and anonymity. On a dare at a sleepover when they were younger, Jacie had once made her walk through Andersonville Park in a gold leotard and sling-on fairy wings, and no one had even stared. Maggie had been mortified, but Jacie had always been like that—loving and funny in a biting way. She wasn’t the kind of friend Maggie had seen in movies, who she felt like she could open up to about her deepest secrets. Jacie was the kind of friend who made you walk through Andersonville Park in a gold leotard and said she was trying to get you to lighten up, and who sometimes got jealous when you got more attention from guys than she did. But Maggie still missed her like crazy.
    One afternoon as Gerald walked in, he came right past the desk without looking at her. Maggie watched him out of the corner of her eye as he passed. Studying him intently for the first time, she noticed that he limped just slightly.
    “Elsa, is there something wrong with Gerald’s legs?” she asked, after he’d disappeared down the aisle.
    “Well, leg . He’s only got one,” Elsa said matter-of-factly.
    Maggie turned and looked at her, leaning on her hands. “Elsa, you said you thought he was the killer.”
    “Well, he could be.”
    “Don’t you think it’d be kind of hard to capture and drown girls when you’re that age and you only have one leg?”
    Elsa shrugged. “I dunno how psychopaths do what they do.” She proceeded to pick up a true-crime novel she was reading. As if anyone was more of an expert on psychopaths than Elsa.
    Maggie tried to picture Gerald lugging the gramophone onto her porch. It didn’t seem so sinister now. At worst, he was a creepy old guy with a crush, that was all.
    The first week of November, summer ducked its head back in for a few last, rare days. Almost every day that week, Maggie could see Pauline and Liam out the window playing baseball in the damp, brown field in the evenings, Pauline winding up like a spider in water, Liam sizing her up in his serious, observant way before throwing his pitch. Sometimes she went to watch, and sometimes she stayed inside and worked on her schoolwork: comparative world lit, European history, advanced calculus, and French III.
    “Sweets, can you pot all the geraniums and move them into the cellar?” her mom said on her way out one morning. “I want to bring them in for the winter. I wasn’t expecting that early snow, but I’m hoping they’re okay.” She crossed her fingers in the air. Maggie wondered why her mom had planted them when they were just going to have to bring them back in, but she guessed she’d just gotten carried away with having a yard for the first time and wanting to make it nice.
    She walked out to the garden that afternoon and surveyed the property. All in all, they’d made some good progress. Her father had painted two sides of the house so far. The field was tamed, and the bushes had been neatly trimmed so that they no longer looked like they were swallowing the house. The porch had been sanded, with boards replaced in some places, and her mom had hung some yellow wind chimes. The mailbox was painted, and they had cleared a pleasant little pathway between some semi-well-shaped shrubs from the back door to the driveway. The house no longer looked derelict or unlived in. She would have upgraded it to “shabby but charming.”
    Her mom had laid out all the planters. Maggie began to fill them—pulling out the geraniums from under the roots and tucking them into the potting soil—then hauling them toward the cellar door.
    She turned at the sound of footsteps on the grass and found Liam standing there with a shovel.
    “Pauline thought you guys might need some help. She saw your mom putting out the planters this morning.”
    “Oh.” Maggie wiped the hair out of her eyes. “Thanks. I’m okay actually.”
    She didn’t want to be alone with him. It made her