Shadow Season Read Free

some way. Lonely outsiders, a pair among the handful left behind during winter vacation for lack of families or other reasons. Finn does a quick count. There are ten students and faculty members left on campus. Eleven if Vi has stayed, and he suspects she has.
    Of course she has.
    Roz’s car starts up in the lot out front. It grumbles, falters, and gurgles. She’s off with Duchess to pick up extra supplies for Christmas dinner before the snow starts.
    The scent of the girl’s blood lingers, keeping his head red and sticky.
    He reaches into his desk for the bottle of cologne he keeps there. He dabs some on his index finger, covers his top lip, and breathes, and breathes. It doesn’t drive away the vision of his dead wife Dani, naked and glaring, sticking the S&W .38 in his face and pulling the trigger.

ST. VALARIAN’S ACADEMY FOR GIRLS IS a small but prestigious school with a relatively meager staff. Four satellite cottages surround three buildings built a century and a half ago, protected by the historical society because a minor Civil War battle occurred on its front steps and Rutherford B. Hayes once slept here back when the school was a hotel. Whenever you told anybody that, you also had to explain that Hayes was the nineteenth president of the United States. They’d ask, Ah yeah, what did he do? And you had to explain, He got the last federal troops out of the South after Reconstruction, he ordered the Panama Canal built, and he reformed a corrupt and bankrupt Civil Service.
    Everyone would go, Ah yeah, what’s his name again?
    An hour and a half north of Manhattan you were in the deep sticks, nearly as off the map as if you’d gotten lost in the Ozarks. When you said “town” you were talking about Three Rivers, which really wasn’t much of a town at all. Just a main street five blocks long with a handful of stores that made most of their money off St. Val’s. A couple of stoplights, hardly any road signs.
    There are truck stops with bad food. There are train tracks but no station. Juke joints with country rockersblaring solid bass tracks and mean harmonizing so the strippers could hump the poles and get nasty enough to make a few bucks. Enough to feed their habits and feed their kids.
    A small rural town like most others, except this one’s on its way out. To the east is a closed sugar factory. To the north, an abandoned feed mill. A lot of stores are still open but more and more are closing. The nicer houses close to Main Street still look well kept, lawns trimmed, flower beds heavy with new growth in summer. The owners are retirees set with their pensions, with nowhere to go anyway.
    Moving out from the center of town through neighborhoods you see cheaper properties going to hell. Huge Victorians that should’ve been converted years ago now boarded up. There are halfway houses for runaways, dopers, the mentally challenged, abused wives. Nursing homes where the elderly look near-enough dead on the porches that every time you pass by you’ve got to wonder, He still breathing?
    Spiraling out from there you see the effects of inflation and recession more blatantly. Shacks are scattered into the hills as if they were tossed there by hurricanes. They lean, propped in odd directions, pine-board doors hanging from busted hinges, roofs and walls ready to collapse.
    The old ways don’t die, they persist through poverty, illness, depression, murder. Floods have washed the land into beautiful and strange patterns, boulders and uprooted trees stacked against the rim of the box valley. Cinder-block roadhouses still kick it up each night, more lively now than ever.
    All of this Roz has described for him in great detail.
    A lot of the land has been sold to developers who are waiting for the economic stimulation promised by the president. Most men of the holler have worked their lives away in the sugar factory and the feed mill. Many of them drifted down to the city or up to the Canadian border towns. Those left can