Read Online Dead Letter Day by Eileen Rendahl - Free Book Online

with her, too.
    It hadn’t occurred to me until recently that she might not have known the answers herself. If she ended up in charge of me the same way I ended up in charge of Sophie, there was a darn good chance she had no idea. I certainly didn’t.
    The next question was, why not just tell me that? Why not admit that she wasn’t the all-knowing all-seeing Oz that I thought she was?
    I looked over at Sophie and figured I might know the answers to that question, because there was more than one. Sophie trusted me to guide her. If I admitted I was as lost as she was, would it panic her? Would it make her feel even more insecure than she already did?
    Would she still trust me if she knew I didn’t have all the answers?
    Poor Sophie. I hadn’t thought to put on a show for her until it was way too late. She already knew I didn’t know the answers to a lot of her questions.
    Then there was the pride thing. It’s not much fun admitting how much I don’t know. Mae probably didn’t relish the feeling either.
    To be honest, and this isn’t entirely easy for me since I’ve spent a lot of time trying to skirt the truth with a lot of people, it kind of pissed me off in retrospect. I’d trusted Mae. When she said that I wasn’t ready to learn somethingor that I’d understand later, I believed her. To figure out at this late date that she was blowing smoke up my ass left me doubting everything she ever taught me, which is a lot.
    My mother, on the other hand, has always been a big believer in telling the truth as well as she can. If the trip to the dentist was going to be unpleasant, I knew about it beforehand. If a visit to Great Aunt Anna was going to be boring, she didn’t try to shine me on and tell me it would be fun. I was prepared.
    Weird. I never thought there’d be a day where I compared my mother and Mae and found Mae to be the one wanting. I’d adored Mae. Worshipped her, even. My mother? I tolerated her. I treated her with respect because that was what was expected of me. It was starting to be reality, though.
    I stole another glance over at Sophie, who was chewing her bottom lip as we drove along. “I honestly don’t know,” I told her. “I think there has to be something about us, though.”
    She flung her hands in the air. “I think so, too. I mean, I wasn’t the only girl to get resuscitated around then. There had to have been some near drownings or something like that, right?”
    I nodded. I’d thought the same thing. We cruised past the Costco and the Target in Woodland and headed back out into open farmland.
    “So why did we become Messengers and those other people had to stay normal?” She paused and thought for a second. “Or die.”
    Whoa. Totally not how I would have phrased it. “I’m not sure. I figure we must have some sort of hardwiring in our brains or something that made us more…sympathetic to the change.”
    “That’s what I thought, too! I thought maybe it might besomething genetic so I’ve been asking my mom and dad about my relatives, especially the old dead ones.” She twisted in the seat belt to face me.
    I winced. I knew what she meant, but there had to be a better way to say it. “And?”
    She sunk back in the seat of the Buick. “And not much. I had a great, great aunt that I thought might be a possibility, but it turns out she might just have been crazy. At least, they put her away in a mental institution and then they did one of those lobotomy things on her.”
    “Ouch.” There were all kinds of reasons to keep ourselves to ourselves, weren’t there? I merged onto 113 North and into Knights Landing.
    “No kidding.” She twisted back again to face forward. “Think about it, though. Back then, if a woman acted like we do and disappeared a lot and got a lot of weird visitors and things, maybe they would label her crazy.”
    “And what do they call us now?” I was pretty sure “crazy” had been applied by more than one person and more than one time, too.
    She