Free The Keeper by Sarah Langan

Nightmares.”
    “Marley, right? Me, too. Loony broad. Maybe she’ll go for one of those walks and forget her way home. Corpus Christi can have her.”
    Georgia laughed. “You work on that. I don’t know what time I’ll be back so you don’t have to wait up.”
    She made a move to stand but he held up his hand and she settled back into her chair. “I got some news,” he said. “You’ll hear about it anyway.”
    “What?”
    “The conference call today. They said the transition’s over. Two months severance for management, one month for everybody else,” he said without emotion. If she were not his daughter, if she had not lived with him all her life, she would not have known that this information caused him considerable pain to relate.
    She sighed heavily. “You’re fired?” she asked.
    He didn’t answer, and she realized that she had overstepped the boundary between daughter and father. She had admitted that he was fallible. She was briefly irritated that she had a father like this, so lost in time, so old when she had been born.
    He shrugged. “Don’t worry, Georgie, we’ll get by. Just tighten our belts a little. How was the park?” he asked, changing the subject just like that, like their lives would not be different after this. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, Georgie. She wanted to remind him she was no longer ten years old. He could tell her that it wasn’t about the mill, a job he didn’t even like. It was about having nothing to fight against, wishing you did. Not even a reason to be angry, just this biting in your stomach that you can never release. No good reason to let it go, nothing to set it loose on. I get it, Dad. I sympathize, believe me. I cut hair for a living. But they could discuss this later, after things had time to settle. For now, she could let it go. She could give him that.
    “I’m sorry, Dad,” she said.
    He shrugged and she knew he was embarrassed. “Yeah.”
    She got up and he restacked the cards, shuffled.
    “Sure you don’t want to play a little pot poker? I’ll spot you.”
    She laughed. “Good night, Dad.”

SEVEN

The Husband of the Woman Who Jumped Out the Window (Fall from Grace)
    I t was six o’clock on that same Thursday in March, and if Danny Willow had to name the one place he did not want to be right now, it was at the police department. He hadn’t slept well last night, and his eyes were narrow slits reading small words in blurry type. He sighed, pushed his six-inch-deep pile of paperwork aside, and looked out his window.
    The rain was heavy now, and cold enough to cramp his fingers. Cars drove slowly down Main Street, and already runoff from the hill was collecting in the valley. He guessed that with record snowdrifts this year, the flooding would be severe. Maybe the worst in Bedford’s history. Danny rubbed his eyes. He was sick of this. Sick of the whole damn thing.
    When he was born fifty-six years ago, Bedford had already started its decline, but still, the town he’d grown up in was a different place than the one he was watching right now. In those days Clott had still been operational, and there had also been a pretty successful textile mill on the other end of Main Street. People who put in their time at factory jobs had raised kids who wound up moving to Corpus Christi, or else to the top of Iroquois Hill. In church and at town meetings those same people had all been on their best behavior because their reputations had mattered.
    Even when he’d first started as sheriff fifteen years ago, things had been quiet. He’d mostly kept his head down, surfacing every once in a while to lock a rowdy drunk overnight in the clink, or else to direct lost New Yorkers driving BMWs to the nearest deer hunting reserve (and hope to God they didn’t get drunk and shoot each other within town limits). But now every day seemed worse than the last. Kids didn’t sneak their parents’ whiskey or their big brothers’ pot; they huffed spray