Free Barefoot Girls by Tara McTiernan Page B

being overpaid for the wreck and it would be off their hands. And while it was true that the house was a wreck, the value of it was very high to the four young women. Keeley was grateful her mother had never known of the house, never known how important it was to her daughter. Margaret Lockwood O’Brien wasn’t about to let her useless excuse for a daughter have happiness when hers had been torn away from her.
    Keeley thought of Hannah in the Barefooter house, sending her the key. She thought of the novel her daughter had written and that she had put down over and over again, never getting beyond the first two pages. The review. Those horrible words – lies.
    “A neglected and often abandoned daughter of an alcoholic parent.” The words still pulsed and burned in her mind, inescapable.
    A flash came to her of her daughter’s little frightened face when she was four or so. In the house. She had left Hannah alone in the house.
    No, no, that never happened.
    Keeley shook her head and sat up. Too many Mean Greens. The little cozy attic room that she loved to curl up in suddenly felt tiny and airless. It was hot up here. Too hot.
    Keeley climbed out of bed and stood up, swimming in the large flowered yellow cotton pajamas Pam had loaned to her, pajamas that fit Pam’s burly frame perfectly. Keeley tied the drawstring on the bottoms tighter, rolled up the legs so the pants wouldn’t trip her, and carefully tiptoed barefoot down the stairs, gasping a little and feeling the old anxiety galloping back. As she reached the bottom of the stairs she heard a soft snoring coming from Pam’s room and the chatty sound of a late-night talk-show coming from Jacob’s room next door, a sliver of blue light wedged under his door. She gasped again at the cooler air on the first floor, but the pressure on her chest was only growing, and she ran on tip-toes down the hall and through the living area toward the back of the house.
    Once she unlocked the sliding glass door to the deck and rolled it back, she took large gulps of cool salt air as if drinking it. Oh, good.
    Flash – a little figure alone by the road, cars rushing by, a brown-haired girl who was crying. Was that Hannah?
    No!
    Keeley pulled the sliding door shut behind her and ran across the deck to where the stairs went down to the sand. Then she was running on the beach that was studded with little rocks that hurt Keeley’s now-tender feet, feet that used to be like moccasins when she was young, they were so hard and leathery from being barefoot all the time. Even a full month of being barefoot in August every year never brought back that toughness.
    She ran down to the waterline and let the small cool waves roll over her stinging feet, gasping back sobs. She had done something to Hannah.
    Had she?
    Keeley looked up at the stars that were faded from encroaching light pollution, not brilliant like they were at Captain’s when she was a young woman lying in a rowboat padded with blankets in the arms of the only man she had loved with everything in her, without reserve. The stars were going away. What would she wish on now?
    Sobbing softly, she spoke in the breaths she was able to fit in between the wrenching pains that gripped her chest, “God. Please help. Help us. Help Hannah. I’m sorry. I didn’t. Didn’t mean to. Hurt her. Did I? Did I hurt her? God, please. If I did. Please help us.”
    Wiping at her eyes and wet face, she looked around. She didn’t see anyone. She would do what they always did back on Captain’s when things were horrible. “Blackest night, blackest water, wash it away,” she chanted in a wavering voice just as the Barefooters used to chant together, climbing naked one by one into the water of the Bay at midnight.
    Midnight was part of the spell. It wasn’t midnight now, but it was dark and she couldn’t breathe all the way, her breath kept catching halfway and her chest felt like it was being crushed.
    She took off her borrowed pajamas, dropped