Free The Keeper by Sarah Langan Page A

paint under the bridge. Gangs of them wandered stoned through Main Street like zombies. And then there were the twenty-year-olds who’d never left Bedford, but discovered crystal meth. Danny could spot those poor slobs a mile away, because for some reason half their teeth were always missing, and the other half were broken and soft as rotten fruit.
    He got a domestic abuse call at least once a week. And he didn’t break up benign lovers’ spats, and take husbands out for walks to cool down, reminding them that raising a hand to a woman is probably the lowest thing you can do. No, not so easy. Now he saw women and even men with eyes swelled shut, and furniture broken to bits, and no matter how many times he saw these things they never ceased to shock him.
    He sometimes wondered why this was happening to Bedford. Why the people seemed to have soured right along with the land. He couldn’t say. He only knew it made him tired. There were people who liked to blame Susan Marley. But he didn’t hold to that kind of superstition. She was just a girl after all, and things had started getting bad long before she was born.
    He would have quit this job long ago if there had been someone willing to take his place. But people were leaving Bedford in droves, especially now that the mill had closed, and he felt a little like the captain of a sinking ship. It was his duty to make sure that every last man safely reached dry land, which, given the circumstances, could be taken literally.
    Danny sighed. At least summer was on its way. At least he and April would soon take a vacation. He liked Florida, because at night they could watch giant sea turtles lay their eggs in the sand. She liked Saratoga Springs, so she could see her sister’s children. She went there at least once a year and when she got home she would tell him: They’re such trouble. Thank golly we never had kids. In return he’d ask her, “Then why do you go?” I like to see what I missed.
    April had a little problem. When she was a kid, around fifteen, she got put in the family way by a boy named Kevin Brutton. She’d been too young to know any better, and had waited until the thing was seven months along. She never got very big around the middle, which he guessed was how she’d been able to convince herself that she’d only gained a few pounds until pretty late in the game. And then one night, while her parents were at a recital of Handel’s Messiah at Colby College, she stole a bottle of their Tennessee whiskey. She drank half of it, and she was a tiny thing back then. Then she jumped out her second-story bedroom window. She landed stomach first on the snow below. Somehow, she didn’t wind up breaking a single bone. Hardly any bruises. It must have been a terrible feeling. Thinking that one way or the other, her problem was going to be solved. And then, after all the courage it took; sitting on the sill of her bedroom window, wondering if she might die right along with the thing she carried, and finally jumping out, only to stand back up again, the lump in her stomach still present, ready to raise its hand and say, Howdy.
    She got up off the ground and went back inside her parents’ house. Ate a sandwich. Got hungry the way you sometimes do when you’re drunk, only she didn’t know she was drunk. She said she hadn’t been sure which was scarier, that dizzy sick feeling in her head, or the other feeling in her stomach. She wound up throwing up right there in the kitchen, hunks of peanut butter and jelly on Wonder Bread. She got all kinds of upset when he asked her what bread and what jelly (grape), and did the peanut butter have chunks (nope, creamy), and what was she wearing (a blue pleated skirt and yellow blouse under her pea coat), and even what kind of day was it (a sunny winter day with birds chirping), but he couldn’t help it. Told her it was the detective in him. Hated, actually, the idea that she had gone through it alone, and with those details