by Sonya Weiss
I made my best sarcastic face and crossed my fingers without enthusiasm. “Definitely.” Allison drove away at a turtle’s pace as I climbed our front steps.
Mom rocked slowly in the porch swing beside the front door, bundled in a blanket and sipping hot coffee from her favorite mug. “I guess you heard the news.”
Of all the features I loved at our new home, the wide-planked wraparound porch was my favorite, followed closely by the swing. I was tempted to join her, but if I sat, I might not get up again.
I opened the front door and she followed me inside. “Hasn’t everyone?”
The shaggy mop sprawled on our kitchen floor rolled to life. “Woof.”
“Hey, Chester.” I squatted to pat his fluffy sheep doggie head. “Did you meet the neighbors?”
“Woof.” His halfhearted response warmed me. If Chester wasn’t concerned, neither was I.
“Did you eat?” Mom was dressed in blue scrubs and white sneakers. Her bag sat at the foot of the stairs, ready to go. I barely saw her on nights we both worked. She hated it, but after taking seventeen years off to raise a daughter, she’d accepted the only available shift without argument. She couldn’t be picky and she couldn’t stay with Dad. You cheat. You lose.
“Yep.” I rubbed my tummy, pretending it wasn’t filled with fizzing nerves after all the wild stories I’d heard tonight.
Mom sloughed out of the blanket and threaded both arms through her coat. She wrestled her hair free from the collar and smiled. Her brown eyes sparkled. “They have sons.”
I laughed. “You in the market again?”
“No, but you are.” She lifted her bag over one shoulder.
“I’m not.” Never again in this town.
“Kirk was a jerk.” Her smile widened. “It’s probably not even a coincidence that rhymes.”
I averted my eyes, choosing to focus on the house across the cornfield, which normally was dark with shadows but now seemed illuminated by a hundred indoor lights. “I’m waiting for college. Zoar’s a small town. Dating here is complicated.”
Mom moved toward the door, pity in her voice. “They aren’t all the same. Men, I mean.”
“I know.” I didn’t. I actually wondered daily how many people weren’t liars instead of the other way around.
“The boys are cute.” She opened the door and stopped to look at me.
“I heard they fled here to escape all the charges against them.”
She made a sour face.
“And they’re criminally insane, insanely rich… And generally insane in a variety of other ways.” I ticked off the insanes on my fingers.
Chester ambled to the door and tugged on his leash dangling from the coat rack. “Woof.”
“Lock up after your walk and stay in until morning. A storm’s coming.” Mom gripped my chin and kissed my cheek. “No wild parties.”
I crossed my heart and hooked Chester onto his leash.
Mom jogged down the steps to her Bronco, throwing one last kiss over her shoulder and gripping the coat to her chest.
I wiped inevitable lip prints off my face with the back of one hand.
“Come on, Chester.” Wind whipped leaves and dirt into tiny hurricanes on the sidewalk as we rounded the house to the backyard. “Make it fast, mister.”
Chester and I jogged through the grass to the decrepit cemetery where he liked to do his business. The cemetery was older than most things in town, which was to say old. The crumbling headstones and rusted iron gates charmed me, like living history books. I’d made rubbings of the stones during walks with my dad when I was in grade school, had my first kiss under the willow in the back, and cried my eyes dry on the broken stone wall when I learned my dad did the deed—the ultimate betrayal—and we were leaving. To others, it didn’t make sense to fear the sight of an old home and yet wander comfortably in a cemetery. It made perfect sense to me. The cemetery, I knew. I understood. I had hundreds of memories there. Happy ones. The house was a mystery cloaked in hearsay and dark tales. I peered at the tall gables in the distance. Hale Manor stared balefully back over the top of the small cornfield where a spinning scarecrow creaked on its post, thanks to building winds.
“Woof.” Chester barked at a pair of black squirrels playing chase in the trees.
I traced the unusual symbol on a headstone with my fingertips. The symbol was my favorite mystery of the ancient grounds. I leaned against a replica of the winged goddess Nike. She stood sentinel near the center of the graves. For years, I’d assumed Nike was an angel who’d lost her marble head to a storm or age. Mom corrected me. She’d pointed the “angel” out to me in one of her mythology books when I was in grade school. Nike was the goddess of victory. A strange thought when surrounded by the dead. The company she kept didn’t seem victorious to me.
The symbol beside Nike’s gown-covered feet matched many, but not all, of the headstones and markers in the Hale family’s resting grounds. Mom couldn’t explain the symbol. She said she hadn’t seen it, but she didn’t pay much attention to details the way I did. A family crest was her best guess. The explanation would’ve made more sense if every stone bore the symbol. The mark consumed my thoughts in middle school. I wrote a paper on it in eighth grade wherein I hypothesized the symbol stood for male superiority. My evidence: the symbol never appeared on a stone bearing a woman’s name. The theory had holes because the oldest stones were sometimes illegible, crumbled and a few were written in a script I didn’t recognize as English. Still, I made rubbings of two dozen stones to support my argument and earned an A on the paper, mostly for my enthusiasm. The smooth symbols never showed up in the rubbings.
A sprinkling of raindrops hit my face, jerking me back to reality. “Time to go home.”
We meandered through the darkness, light drizzle, and cold. Our last walk of the night was like that. I didn’t want woken in the wee hours because Chester didn’t pee when he was supposed to, so I took baby steps and he sniffed each blade of grass individually. My focus jumped to Hale Manor a thousand times. All the lights inside bothered me. Who were these people and what brought them here?
Back in my yard, I dared one last look behind me. Over the tops of the corn, a curtain slid shut in an upstairs window, leaving the silhouette of a person staring down at me. I imagined they stared, anyway. It was possible the person had their back to me, though it seemed less likely. The light behind them shone like a beacon in the night.
“Come on, Chester.” I ran the rest of the way to the front door and locked up, twisting the dead bolt for good measure.
Chester shook water over me and the floor before running through the rooms, sliding and rampaging the way he did when he was wet. I toweled up the mess, toweled down the dog, and hit the shower before homework and bed. I left my door open so Chester would sleep in my room and patrol the house while I slept. Falling asleep wasn’t easy with my head buzzing from questions and rumors. What kind of people would move to Hale Manor? Didn’t they know the home’s history? Didn’t it bother them?
By midnight, the rhythm of rain on our roof had washed the worries from my mind and lulled my anxious body to sleep.
I shot upright an hour later, gripping sheets to my chin and looking for Chester. “Did you hear that?” The soft green glow of numbers on my alarm clock teased a thought just outside my memory’s reach. One AM. I pressed a palm to my chest, certain my heart would break my ribs. “I heard a woman scream.”
Chester lifted his head, ears perked. “Woof.”
I stared out the darkened window toward the enormous home separated from me by one small field, and I patted my pillow until Chester curled up on it. I laid my head on him and gripped my phone to my chest, waiting impatiently for daylight.
Meet the Author
Sonya Weiss is a freelance writer, ghostwriter, and author, including the Stealing the Heart series with Entangled Publishing. She's addicted to great books, good movies, and Italian chocolates. She's passionate about causes that support abused animals and ch
ildren. Her parents always supported her bringing stray animals home, although the Great Dane rescue was a surprise. Visit her site at www.sonyaweiss.com, find her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/AuthorSonyaWeiss and follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/sonyaweiss.
Table of Contents
Cover Copy
Books by Sonya Weiss
Reckoning
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 1
Meet the Author