Free Summer of the Dead by Julia Keller Page A

her—right off the uniform swirls of faded white paint.
    She lowered her face. Looked at Bell, still smiling. “There was this time once in the summer,” she said. “I took you down by the creek. Being summer and all, it was real hot at night, just like now. Thought it might settle you down. Oh, you were real upset that night—screaming and crying. Man, you were something. Worse’n a siren. Daddy was more pissed than ever. Royally, royally pissed. He was back in the trailer but he could still hear you—hell yeah, he could still hear you!—so he came charging out and then he went right down to the creek after us and he hollered, ‘I told you to shut her up! Give her whatever the hell she wants—just get her to shut her fucking mouth!’ I said, ‘I can’t.’ And he said, ‘What the hell? I told you to give her whatever she damned well wants!’ And I said, ‘I can’t .’ Now, at this point he’s ready to haul off and hit me. So I explain it to him.”
    â€œExplain what?”
    Shirley took her time before speaking, enjoying the memory before she shared it, letting it wash all over her like a cat’s tongue, both rough and smooth.
    â€œI told him,” Shirley said, “how you’d seen the moon in the creek—the reflection of the moon on the top of the water—and that’s what you wanted. The moon. You kept on reaching for it, reaching and reaching, trying to touch it, and when you couldn’t, you were so mad that all you could do was scream.”
    â€œThe moon.”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œGuess I was a real dumb-ass, right?” Bell said. A rueful wince. “Even at three.”
    â€œYou knew what you wanted. And just because you couldn’t have it—well, that didn’t mean you didn’t still want it with all your heart, you know? I carried you back inside, but if I hadn’t, I swear you’d still be down there today, trying to get at that damn moon.” Bemused smile. “Lord, you were stubborn.”
    For a moment, neither spoke. There was so much Bell wanted to explain to her sister, so many important points she needed to make, so many questions she still had to ask. Things were going to have to change in this house, and change fast, because Carla was coming, and Bell couldn’t allow Shirley to go on this way—wild, reckless, unreliable. She had to make her see. There was a violent criminal in the area, someone who hadn’t hesitated to take a sledgehammer to an old man’s head, and she knew that her sister and her daughter were at risk, just as everyone was at risk, always.
    Those were the things that Bell needed to say to Shirley, and to say urgently: Be alert. Stay on the main roads. Don’t take chances. And more. There was always more to say.
    But right now, here in this dim room early on a summer morning, Bell was silent for a little while longer, feeling the ponderous yet somehow not burdensome presence of the past as it weighed down her thoughts, blocking everything coming in or going out, the stopper in the bottle, the stone at the mouth of the cave.

 
    Chapter Nine

    When her shift ended at 7 A.M. , Lindy didn’t much like to drive home. She liked being finished with work, of course. But she dreaded the moment each morning when she had to turn off the highway and bump down the county road and then make a right-hand turn at the rock-dinged red mailbox marked CRABTREE and see, once again, the ugly house set back in a snarl of old trees, reachable only by this dirt lane that kept visitors away more reliably than a NO TRESPASSING sign. Perry Crum often gave her grief about the decrepit road that ran back here, telling her she deserved better. “One of these days,” he’d add, “this here mail truck’s just gonna disappear in one of them big ruts, taking a couple of big boxes of these books of yours along with it.” She knew he