Read Online A Fate Totally Worse Than Death by Paul Fleischman - Free Book Online Page A

Weiss remembering that a man by the same name had been executed fifty years ago—for murder
.
    The plot came back to her. She closed the book. It wouldn’t help with Helga. Though Rolf was a ghost, no one was able to stop him from killing the descendants of the jurors who’d falsely convicted him. Would she soon be as dead as his victims? Most people who tried to kill ghosts ended up getting killed themselves. Bullets were no good against them. Silver daggers through the heart only worked on vampires. Ghosts didn’t
have
hearts. The trick was to coax them to return to the grave. But how? She’d gone to a bookstore and read the back covers of the entire forty-book Bloodstains series, feeling the need to shower after to remove the gore splashing up from the artwork. None of the cases matched Helga’s exactly. What would she report to Brooke and Tiffany at their meeting in the afternoon?
    2:45. 3:02. Eyelids at half-mast, she railed in X-rated fashion against her insomnia, then sighed and picked up
Let Freedom Ring
. She considered bringing it down on her head, not caring if it broke her neck, but was too weak to lift the granite slab of a book high enough. She propped it on her chest, felt her ribs give, and grimly turned to Chapter Six. “While Britain’s colonial policies….” she began. A moment later, it seemed, it was morning, the sun slapping her in the face.
    Groaning, she closed her eyes against the glare. She felt dead, for an instant hoped she was, then recognized her room with disappointment. She fingered a strand of her blond hair and endeavored to focus her eyes upon it. She’d found gray hairs lately, necessitating search-and-destroy missions each morning. Groping for the hand mirror on her table, she held it up, squinted, then gasped. Half her hair had gone gray in the night.
    She sat up, fully awake, her mind racing. She couldn’t pull all the gray hairs out, unless she wanted to look half bald. If she got a buzz haircut, the silver would still show. She rejected wigs and shaving her head. She’d have to dye her hair. Not that she had any dye or the time to apply it. She’d pick some up on the way home from school. In the meantime, she resolved to wear her hair up and hidden beneath her floppy beret.
    She crept to her door and listened, judging if the coast was clear to the bathroom. If her spiteful younger sister, a sophomore, got a look at her hair and blabbed, Danielle would have no course but suicide. She cracked the door, stuck out her nose, then dashed down the hall, her robe over her head. She locked the bathroom door behind her, turned on the shower, and sighed with relief. Then she slipped off her robe and nightgown, glanced down—and felt the blood halt in her veins.
    â€œNo!” she moaned and blinked her eyes, praying they were playing tricks from fatigue. Pushing her grandmotherly gray hair aside, she peered more closely at her breasts. Withered, wrinkled, pathetically droopy, they looked like they’d been deflated during the night. They now hung empty, pointing at the floor. The term “pickle tits” rose up in her mind, an epithet she’d once applied loudly and in mixed company to a rival, leading to the girl’s eventual withdrawal from school and move out of state. Danielle’s breasts not only hung low, they looked ancient, as if she’d exchanged them with some toothless crone from
National Geographic
. Never again, she vowed, would she shower in P.E. She’d claim she had cramps and sit out the class. After a week of that, she’d excuse herself from showering on religious grounds. She’d forge a note from her minister, or some made-up Indian guru. She’d go to the Supreme Court if she must to keep her breasts from being seen!
    She averted her eyes from them as she entered the shower and began to wash. She raged at Helga, begging God to smite her with acne, AIDS, cellulite. The list was cut