We Don't Know Why Read Free

back at me.
    “Why?” I asked. “Why couldn’t there have been somebody to save him? Or something?”
    Then I stood staring at him, I was so startled to see tears in his eyes. We hadn’t talked about Mykel before. I hadn’t wanted to.
    He stretched his hand toward me. He said, very low, “We don’t know why things happen, Mishell. We just don’t know.” He said, “I was frightened. If you—if you went, too—Mishell, I don’t know whether I could handle it.”
    I had to close my eyes. Didn’t see him step toward me, but I did feel him hug me. My arms lifted and I hung on to him, I laid my head against the rock of his shoulder as he hugged me hard. It was maybe a whole minute before he turned into his cranky self again and started hustling me toward sick bay.
    Awhile later, tucked in by a nurse with a firm hand, I should have been sleeping, but I was lying there in the dim blue light listening to the laserharp music, awake but having dreams like visions—maybe from the drugs. Maybe not. I dreamed of the brown people on the planet far below. Angel, they were saying. The angel sat with us and ate our bread. In a couple of generations, an old man would tell his grandchildren how in his youth he had been rescued by an angel. The angel rescued me, he would say, but not my sister. My sister died. The angel would not save her. When I was a boy, the angel rescued me from drowning, he would say. And he rescued my friend. We knew we were special ones, blessed ones, with angels to protect us. We grew tall. But one day when he was still a young man my friend went out hunting deer and was captured by the barbarians who live beyond the mountains. And he did not try to escape, but waited in utmost faith for his angel to come and save him and punish the barbarians. His captors tortured him with fire, and no angel came. They tortured him until he died in agony. I know, because I saw. No angel saved him. And I could not save him either.
    We do not know why angels come sometimes and sometimes turn their backs and fly away, the old man would say. We just don’t know. Things happen, and we don’t know why.

Edgar Award-winning author Nancy Springer,
    well known for her science fiction, fantasy, and young adult novels,
    has written a gripping psychological thriller—smart, chilling, and unrelenting...
DARK LIE
    available in paperback and e-book in November 2012
    from New American Library
    Dorrie and Sam White are not the ordinary Midwestern couple they seem. For plain, hard-working Sam hides a deep passion for his wife. And Dorrie is secretly following the sixteen-year-old daughter, Juliet, she gave up for adoption long ago. Then one day at the mall, Dorrie watches horror-stricken as Juliet is forced into a van that drives away. Instinctively, Dorrie sends her own car speeding after it—an act of reckless courage that puts her on a collision course with a depraved killer...and draws Sam into a desperate search to save his wife. And as mother and daughter unite in a terrifying struggle to survive, Dorrie must confront her own dark, tormented past.
    “A darkly riveting read...compelling.”
    —Wendy Corsi Staub, national bestselling author of Nightwatcher and Sleepwalker
    “ A fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat thriller that will have you reading late into the night and cheering for the novel's unlikely but steadfast heroine.”
    —Heather Gudenkauf, New York Tim es best-selling author of The Weight of Silence and These Things Hidden
    Learn more about all of Nancy’s titles at her website, www.nancyspringer.com.