Three Quarters Dead Read Free Page A

and all three of them turned to me. Me. Just like that.
    They’d been talking about Halloween. Their own take on Halloween. I couldn’t picture them going door to door, holding out their little plastic jack-o’-lantern pails. Anyway, I’d never been included in anything but lunch. I had the idea they thought maybe I wasn’t quite ready for . . . prime time.
    But then Tanya turned to me, like I’d been on her agenda all along. From that day she’d overlooked the phone in my lap and drew me with her eyes into the group. “Tonight at my house, Kerry? Just dessert and coffee. Decaf. Then we’ll see where the evening takes us.” Just like that.
    Me? Time really did stand still then, like my heart. And the countdown till tonight started ticking. They’d decided on jeans and bulky sweaters.
    “What a pity,” Makenzie said. “I can still get into my old Tinker Bell costume.”

CHAPTER TWO
    The Picture of Alyssa
    BEFORE MY PARENTS’ divorce, we lived so near Tanya’s house I could have walked up there. Now my mother had to drive me. Which I didn’t particularly like. But anything to get there. Halloween was already happening all over town.
    Some people went a little overboard on the house decorations. Life-size scarecrows beside doors and floodlit ghosts escaping from dormer windows and plastic tombstones on lawns, reading REST IN PIECES. Fake cobwebs by the ton.
    It was still the kiddy time of evening. The crosswalks were crowded with parents and nannies leading tiny trick-or-treaters. Little Brides of Frankenstein and one Snow White after another. Dinosaurs and flop-earred Eeyores. Mini-mummies unraveling along the pavement. Small, toddling Draculas with their black tailcoats sweeping the pavement behind.
    Waiting for a light, my mother said, “Remember the year you wanted to be the Little Mermaid?”
    “Turn left at the top of the hill,” I said, because you could almost see Ridge Road from here.
    The Halloween decorations were all professionally done. Not an artificial cobweb in sight. Nothing floodlit. Only a few front lights were on to welcome trick-or-treaters. Now we were at Tanya’s, because Natalie’s Audi and Makenzie’s Scion were parked out by the curb.
    “Don’t turn in the drive,” I told my mother.
    “I have to turn around,” she said. “Call me when—”
    “I’ll get a ride home.” I was out of the car already, heading up the curving flagstone walk over all that rolling lawn, not a leaf fallen on it. Not a plastic tombstone. It was a long, rambling house, country French, probably. At the entrance was an arrangement of squashes and gourds and ears of corn in designer colors. A florist had done it. Very restrained.
    I rang the bell, and lights flickered inside, through the leaded-glass window of the door. A tall, willowy figure was coming closer, a silhouette. I wanted it to be Tanya, but when the door opened, it was a really thin, really glamorous woman in a white turtleneck sweater.
    “You must be Kerry,” she said. “I’m Joanne.”
    She led me through the fabulous house, up a step, down a step, over Oriental rugs glowing in dark reds and blues on polished floors. If you were going to imagine the house Tanya would live in, here it was. We moved toward warm light and laughter. It wasn’t the formal dining room. It was another one, and I could see them from here, around the table: busy at something, leaning over to each other, being in their zone.
    And here was the great part. They were all three wearing these towering, black, pointy witch hats: black felt with wavery brims and half as tall as the room. It was great. They were.
    Joanne turned just at the door. “Watch your back,” she murmured. But I looked behind me, and there wasn’t anything there.

    THEN IT WAS the four of us. “Here’s Kerry finally,” Tanya said, though I was on time. “Joanne, you can bring in the dessert now.”
    They were sitting around this table in their witch hats, she and Natalie and Makenzie,