Free Arrowood by Laura McHugh Page A

I couldn’t hear the party beneath us at all. Thick layers of plaster and wood silenced Bing Crosby and the clinking of glasses and my mother’s shrill laughter. The sturdy bones of the house absorbed it all before it could reach me.

CHAPTER 6
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    I arrived early for my Friday meeting with Josh Kyle. The roadside park had a swing set and picnic tables that looked out over the river, and I sat at one of the tables to wait, picking at the peeling paint and reading the graffiti that had been carved into the wood with fingernails and pocketknives. Bees swirled around the lone garbage can, McDonald’s wrappers and Dairy Queen cups spilling out onto the ground and stinking in the heat. Though it was nearly October, it was eighty degrees, and sweat dripped down my neck into my bra.
    Across the road from the park, Riverside Cemetery nestled at the edge of a cornfield. Grammy and Grampy and most of my mother’s other relatives were buried there, though the oldest graves had been washed down the Mississippi long ago in a hundred-year flood. Grammy and I used to take a picnic lunch along when we went to pay our respects. I had always secretly hoped to be buried at Riverside instead of at the Catholic cemetery in town, because I didn’t want to lie next to the three other Arden Arrowoods. Why my parents chose to give me such an ill-fated name I couldn’t say, though I assumed they hadn’t thought it through in the way that I did, as a little girl reading my own name on the stones and guessing at my odds.
    In the Catholic cemetery, the Arrowood family plot sat on a west-facing slope in the good part of the old section, where the markers were all upright and the grass still got mowed. My ancestors had favored decorative tombstones with lambs and weeping angels, torches and doves, large stone arches and pillars topped with draped urns. Three empty spots waited for my sisters and me, prudently reserved for us by Granddad in case we died young or failed to marry. There were two small marble angels for Violet and Tabitha, but no slabs engraved with their names, because no one wanted to set in stone something that might not be true.
    I’d been waiting at the picnic table for about ten minutes when a white van with tinted windows pulled into the gravel lot. It was the sort of van I always avoided parking next to, because it looked like a vehicle you might use if you wanted to kidnap someone. Though of course I knew you didn’t need a van for that.
    Josh Kyle emerged wearing the same hat and jacket that he wore in his website photo, both embroidered with the logo for Midwest Mysteries. It was too hot out for the jacket, and I figured maybe it was part of his investigative uniform, that he felt like he needed to wear it to look professional. He wasn’t wearing the sunglasses from the picture, though. Instead he had regular glasses with thick black frames. I hadn’t expected him to be so clean-cut and normal-looking, someone I might find attractive if I walked past him in a bar. He didn’t appear to be much older than me, though the hair sticking out below his cap was salt-and-pepper gray.
    I stood up, and he reached out to shake my hand, his grip firm and businesslike.
    “It really is you,” he said. His voice, too, was a surprise, low and soothing like a radio announcer’s. “You look just like your pictures.”
    “What pictures?”
    “They were posted by your school, something to do with the history department,” he said. “I have a Google alert that sends me anything that comes up with your name.”
    “Really?”
    “I promise that sounds creepier than it really is. It pulls anything with the word ‘Arrowood.’ Just part of the research.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s none of my business, but—how old are you?” I didn’t feel too bad asking, considering how much he already knew about me.
    One corner of his mouth turned up in a lopsided grin. “Twenty-six. I graduated high school the same year as you.”