Dark Rooms Read Free Page A

face. Cutting through the rows of tombstones and markers, she’d steal in our back door, undetected, except by me, watching from my bedroom window. She and Jamie weren’t a couple anymore, but there was a better-than-even chance that the new guy, with whom she’d obviously spent the night, was also in Endicott. That or Minot, the other guys’ dorm.
    I didn’t see Nica as I was hoping to, though. Instead, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of movement or color. Only, when I turned around, no one was there. Suddenly I noticed how quiet everythinghad become. Motionless, too, the leaves and trees perfectly still, not so much as a whisper of a breeze on the air. I closed my eyes. My ears filled with the beating of my heart, the in-outs of my breaths, the contraction of my throat muscles—sounds, I realized, that were always there but hidden, tucked away under every other sound—each shift, throb, flutter magnified, made significant, by the deep silence around me. And then a branch snapped and my eyes flew open. Pulling the old cardigan tight around my chest, I turned, started back to the fence.
    That’s when I heard the police siren in the distance. It ripped into the morning, tearing it in two. For a moment I froze, transfixed. Then I began to run, but heavily, the way you do in nightmares, my limbs clumsy and strange, my feet sinking into the spongy earth, catching there, everything ground down and in slow-motion, and all at once I understood that I was in a nightmare, last night’s, the one I couldn’t remember but now, suddenly, in flashes, could. Still, I hauled my body along, through the trees, over the fence, toward what I knew—knew because it was there, all of it, in that piercing mechanical wail, knew because it was prophesied in my dream, as elusive as a scent, a shadow, a ghost, knew because it was written in the very blood flowing through my veins—would be as bad as it gets.
    As I reached the sidewalk in front of my house, I spotted the cruiser with the siren. It was whipping around the corner of Upham, wide into the right lane of Fiske, rear tire bouncing off the median strip. An unmarked sedan followed seconds later. No swirling cherry lights, but I could tell it was a cop car nonetheless. No mistaking it for anything else. And watching the two vehicles cut sharp rights onto Schofield, the street the graveyard entrance was on, I felt my legs buckling, collapsing beneath me. I dropped first to my knees, then to all fours, the shock of certainty hitting me: Nica was dead.
    My sister was dead.

Chapter 2
    Nica’s body had been found by Graydon Tullis, a sophomore in Endicott House who’d snuck into the graveyard with a couple of guys from food services to get high before morning detention, the very session my dad was overseeing. Afterward, the food services guys had headed down campus to start their shifts at Stokes Dining Hall, and Graydon had headed east to main campus. He was applying Visine as he walked, chin tilted back, lower lid thumbed down, when he tripped on something, went sprawling into a face-plant. He turned around to investigate, thinking it was a tree root, or one of those baby tombstones your eye can sometimes skip over.
    But it wasn’t.
    It was a pair of feet in frayed-lace Converse. Slowly Graydon’s gaze traveled upward, all the while the old camp song “Dem Bones”— with the toe bone connected to the foot bone, and the foot bone connected to the ankle bone, and the ankle bone connected to the leg bone . . . —running through his mind. (A dazed-sounding, pouchy-eyed Graydon told meall this a couple weeks later. Not that I asked. He cornered me as I was ducking out of Stokes, apple in hand, looking for a deserted classroom to eat it in.) And then his gaze arrived at the hipbone connected to the backbone. His first thought was how teeny-tiny the hole was and yet the crazy amount of blood that had leaked from