All Your Pretty Dreams Read Free Page A

She’d smelled the other rooms. Damp was the best you
could say.
    She pulled on her beanie.
Officer Lars had come alone, without Officer Ole. Before it took
both of them to drag the girls out of their squad car. Who knew
what the officers’ names really were; they just looked a Lars and
an Ole.
    “ Ma’am.” He took off his
hat. His hair, short and blond, was creased but neat.
    “ Officer.” Lars had a
moony look on his face so she got straight to business. “Can you
hear that?”
    He turned toward the
garage. “The music?”
    “ Is that what you call it?
Well, it’s midnight and I need some sleep.”
    He scooted off toward the
screeching. She watched him skip away, so eager to help. Christ.
She might as well check to see if the brood was tucked
in.
    The moon was bright in the
east, nearly full. Good news because most of the lights over the
doors were burnt out. The two male students roomed next door.
Andrew opened the door, his glasses crooked on his nose.
    “ You get the wireless
router?”
    “ Not yet.” His laptop was
open on the bed. “Is Terry here?”
    “ He went to the library,
where they have the Internet, something you may have heard of?” He
smirked meanly. Andrew needed to work on his social skills. He
cocked his head. “What the hell is that?”
    “ They call it music around
here.”
    In the next room the quiet
girls, Lydia and Kate, snuggled under the covers, reading. Isabel
told them ‘good night ladies’ and instantly felt seventy years old.
How did she get herself into this? She was a scientist— or would be
when she finished her degree—not a baby-sitter. The racket in the
garage stopped, mid-cacophony.
    “ Thank God.” She savored
the quiet for ten seconds. Then crickets seized the
opportunity.
    Officer Lars was talking in
his slow drawl as he appeared around the corner of the garage. He
gestured toward Isabel and spoke to the man beside him, presumably
the culprit. Shorter than Lars, wiry compared to the policeman’s
bulk, he wore dark jeans and a white t-shirt. His face looked
ghostly pale in the moonlight.
    He raised a hand in a sort
of papal dispensation and called across the drive: “Sorry. I didn’t
know it was so loud.”
    “ Right,” Isabel whispered
and waved them away. She continued on to the next room. Alison and
Kim had roomed here together at first. Now, post-hijinks, they were
split up so they could spread rebellion among the ranks. Alison
opened the door in a red bikini top and low-slung pajama bottoms,
her blonde hair piled on her head.
    “ Checking up on me,
Izzie?” She struck a pose when she saw Lars and the other man, a
hand on her tanned hip. “Evening, guys.”
    “ Give it a rest, Alison.
We go to the blueberry fields tomorrow. It’ll be a long
day.”
    “ Six-thirty?” Maddie
Elliot was painting her toenails. “Are you serious?”
    Officer Lars drove back to
his doughnuts. Isabel continued down the row, the tyrant field
director and the wayward youths. There were ten of them, plus the
driver, and it took every ounce of patience to deal with them. She
hated the way she sounded, so authoritarian, so much the
fun-killer. So like her mother. But that was what Professor Mendel
was paying her for, and if there was one person Isabel would not
let down it was the professor.
    She walked back through the
parking lot to her door. A figure jumped out of the shadows.
“Shit!” Her hand flew to her throat. “What the hell are you
doing?”
    “ Sorry. I just wanted to
apologize for the— the noise.” He stuck out his hand. “Jonathon
Knobel. I was up on the roof this morning.”
    “ Ah. The
raccoon.”
    Up close she got a better
look at him. His hair, messy and hanging over his forehead, was a
dark auburn color most girls would die for. Taller than he looked
earlier, with quirky eyebrows and soulful gray eyes, he had a black
smudge across his white shirt from shoulder to shoulder. He dropped
his hand and was staring at her braids (or her tits, hard