Read Online Crooked by Laura McNeal - Free Book Online

until he found what looked like a stick and then came back to the figures. He did something with whatever he found, and Eddie laughed, a sharp cackling laugh that, to Amos, sounded weirdly made up, the same way Eddie had laughed when Amos and Bruce had left the feeding of the snake. Charles walked around the figures again, this time closer, doing something Amos didn’t want to guess at, and Eddie laughed again, the same fake-sounding laughter. Charles laughed, too, but his laugh was deep and full, as if it came from his darkest center and was completely his own. “Off with their heads,” Charles said in a laughing voice, and Eddie stepped forward and cocked the bat behind his right shoulder.
    No
was the word that popped into Amos’s head, but what popped out of his mouth wasn’t a word at all. It was more of a muffled, foolish-sounding grunt. It sounded a little like
“numph
.
”
It sounded nothing at all like his own voice.
    Still, it was enough.
    Charles, after stilling himself for half an instant, spun menacingly toward Amos, who stood frozen in his tracks. Before yelling, Amos had felt hidden and safe. Now, after opening his mouth and letting loose this funny, unfamiliar voice, he felt a sudden, complete, and paralyzing fear.
    Eddie, who seemed oblivious to Amos’s presence, swung the bat, decapitated the snow woman, and let out another harsh laugh.
    A porch light blazed on.
    Charles glanced wildly at Amos, then grabbed the bat, leaped up the steps of the Goddards’ porch, and knocked the light fixture into pieces. It was dark again. Amos heard footsteps crunching through the iced snow. They were growing louder. In the dark, Charles had again become a ghostly form, except now it was moving toward him. Amos again tried to yell, but this time nothing at all came out. He stood completely mute, frozen there, while, within his motionless body, his heart pounded furiously. The footsteps stopped. Amos’s heart kept pounding. The ghostly form drew close and stopped. For a moment, Amos thought Charles might turn away. Then he heard a peculiar whirring sound as the bat took flight toward him.

9
    GOING
    There were no more requests for deliveries when Clara came home with fifteen dollars in pay that afternoon. This just barely paid for the stationery, and she’d forgotten to clean their own driveway, a fact she realized when she saw that her mother had dug out the car, stuck the shovel into a drift by the driveway, and left. Probably she’d been late and would be mad when she came home. Clara checked for messages from Gerri—none—then went in to set the ingredients for Thai food on the counter. If they all had a nice dinner, maybe her mom wouldn’t care about the shoveling.
    First Clara set the table with their best tablecloth and the good china. The pale pink tablecloth, still tagged with a Kaufmann’s label marked down three times, had to be ironed, and the china had been sitting so long in the cupboard that gnats had died in the cups.
    When all the dishes lay gleaming on the table, Clara built a fire that went out, then another, and when that also failed, she took Ham and the electric heater up to her room, where she stashed her money and stared at her old copies of
Misty of
Chincoteague
and
Stormy: Misty’s Foal,
horse books she’d read at least five times each. Clara didn’t open them. In fact, her heart sunk a little just looking at them. When she’d first started at Melville, she’d brought these and similar books to school with her to read at free moments, but after a while, whenever she brought one of them out of her backpack, someone would make the low shuddery neighing sounds of a cartoon horse, which made everybody laugh. Then one afternoon, standing beside Clara’s locker, Gerri nodded at her horse books and said, “Maybe you shouldn’t bring those baby books to school anymore, you know?”
    Clara fell asleep, and when she