Free The Girl in Blue by Barbara J. Hancock Page A

time her shout was stronger because seeing the water brought more horrible memories flooding back. Pulling. Oh, how she had pulled. But he’d been much heavier than her and she’d come very close to being pulled in instead of being able to pull him out. She could remember the way his hair had floated around his white face. The way his coat—a trench coat like the one she wore—had billowed out from his body in the sucking waves.
    She strained her eyes. She tried to see through the fog along the water’s surface and at its edge.
    But then she heard the sand paper slide of a striking match behind her. Not ghostly like the laughter. Solid. Real.
    She turned and saw The Girl in Blue very close this time, only a yard away near the trees. She stood like she had in the photograph, her empty arms clasped to her chest where the ragdoll should be, but at her motionless feet, a fireplace match burned harmlessly, yet horrifyingly, on the rocks.
    Trinity could smell the sulfuric flame. She watched it flicker and dance. And, suddenly, her own thoughts came back to her, but in a little girl’s voice sing-song and sweet.
    She was a child of Scarlet Falls. Of course she was afraid of the dark.
    The flame seemed to hold back the fog. It seemed to hold back the dark with its tiny flickering halo of light.
    Trinity experienced a moment of revelation, but then Clara Chadwick vanished and in the vacuum of her wake the flame went out. Wet rocks under Trinity’s feet inexplicably shifted and she fell in the same instant. She fell back and in and was submerged. Her startled cry cut off by rivers of metallic water flooding into her nose and mouth.
    Blood.
    Again she tasted blood, smelled blood, swam in blood, but couldn’t get her head above the water. She thought she felt rope binding her arms to her body. She couldn’t move them. Couldn’t claw her way up to the oxygen her tender lungs craved. Her body began to sink in a slow sucking descent to the black bottom of the lake, fathoms below. Time stilled. The water was thick around her. She was frozen, immobilized by ropes she couldn’t see to fight.
    She had been nine years old when it happened, already longfamiliar with The Girl in Blue. The night before had been a restless one, huddled beneath a mound of blankets as the dead girl stood vigil beside her bed.
    Each time Trinity’s eyes had closed in exhaustion, the pale figure had seemed to manifest a little closer and then a little closer still, until she stood in the warm glow of a bedside lamp, horribly gaunt and hollow-eyed.
    Trinity had opened her eyes to the sight of The Girl in Blue less than a few feet away. And there she had stayed the rest of the night as if held by the weak circle of light. She had no matches that night. Perhaps there had been none to be had in the house.
    Trinity hadn’t called her parents. By that time, she’d known they wouldn’t see the child that, to her, was as solid and real as a living girl. Instead, Trinity had fought the tiredness that was sandpaper behind her eyelids. She had stayed awake, if not alert, watching The Girl in Blue in fear that she would break the rules of the macabre staring game they played and move to the edge of her bed while Trinity watched helpless in terror.
    The sun had risen.
    Trinity’s eyes had finally closed.
    And the dead girl was gone when she opened them to the midmorning Saturday light.
    She remembered the pancakes she’d eaten for breakfast. They’d been extra fluffy and sweet, seasoned with her relief. She remembered her mother saying her father was down by the bridge filling in gravel where the road ended and the planks began.
    With perfect clarity, she recalled climbing the stairs all the way up to the Widow’s Walk to “spy” on her father. He would turn and see her and wave. It was something he’d always done since she was small and her mother would bring her up to the great glass telescope to watch him on his postal rounds. She anticipated his wave. It