Free Dawn's Light by Terri Blackstock Page B

Beth!”
    Beth shook out of her thoughts and saw her mother, looking at her like she'd gone off the deep end. “Are you okay?”
    “Fine,” she said. “Just thinking.”
    Her mother put her arm around her, kissed her head. “Let's get home, okay?”
    Beth almost felt safe as they crossed the street and headed for home.

 

    twenty-one
    T HERE WERE PAPERS TO DELIVER, AND B ETH KNEW SHE had to deliver them. Since the killer hadn't shown up yet, maybe he didn't really know where she lived. Maybe that had just been a threat to keep her quiet.
    Or maybe her silence was what had kept her alive so far. He could be watching her now, waiting for one sign that she'd ratted him out to her parents—determined to kill them too, if he had to.
    Would he see her when she went to do her job? When the Crockett Times had converted from a weekly to a daily newspaper, the Brannings had seen a way to earn extra money. Her brothers were doing the hard work of delivering papers door-to-door, each of them with a large route. Lots of adults had applied for those paper routes too, but Harriet, Deni's boss, had favored her family because of all the work Deni did for them.
    Beth had committed to fill all the coin-operated news boxes around Crockett each day. Some of them hadn't been filled Friday, and yesterday Jeff and Logan had done it for her. They wouldn't do it today.
    She hoped her haircut was enough of a disguise to keep the killer from recognizing her. She donned her brother's baseball cap and sunglasses and dressed in clothes that a boy might wear. She hardly recognized herself.
    She consoled herself with the thought that she could take the opportunity to check message boards while she was in different parts of town. Maybe she would see a missing persons poster that would tell her who the dead men were.
    She went out to get on her bike. Would the killer remember that it was silver? That was a common color, so it wasn't likely to call attention to itself. The bike trailer stacked with newspapers would certainly be identifiable, but there were lots of newspaper deliverers around Crockett, and they all had trailers. In fact, almost every family had at least one.
    Still, she felt a little sick as she biked out to the garage behind the newspaper office, where she always picked up her papers. She could usually get her deliveries made in the two hours after lunch. It had worked out well when she was going to school in the mornings. Now that school was out for the summer, she had time to do family chores in the mornings, then the newspapers in the afternoon. All her money went into the family fund.
    She reached the warehouse and pulled her bike in. Delbert, the old man who oversaw the papers, was tying up a stack.
    “Hey, Delbert,” she said, getting off her bike.
    The man looked at her like he didn't know her. “Hello, young fella. Can I help you?”
    She pulled her glasses down and looked at him. “It's me, Beth.”
    He gasped and began to laugh a wheezing, phlegmy laugh. “Beth? I didn't recognize you, darlin'. You look … different.”
    That was good, she thought. She saw Delbert every day. If he didn't recognize her, then surely the killer wouldn't.
    “You runnin' from the law or something? You look like a different person.”
    She put the glasses back on. “Can't a girl get a haircut?”
    “Sure can,” he said, still chuckling. “But that ain't a haircut. That's a scalpin'.”
    She took the cap off to show him it wasn't so bad.
    “You're still a cute li'l ole thing,” he said in his grandfather tone. “Just took me by surprise, that's all.”
    Satisfied that her disguise was serving its purpose, she loaded her papers into her trailer and set out to fill her boxes. Then she rode her bike from one newspaper box to another, stopping at the message boards that were usually near them. At each one, she stopped and read the papers stuck haphazardly all over the boards, looking for word of the missing men.
    At the third board she came