Read Online Hippie House by Katherine Holubitsky - Free Book Online Page A

rooms.
    Late in the afternoon, Eric was interviewed in the living room by a man who had introduced himself as Detective Mather. From where I sat I could see a woman sitting off to the side in my mother’s brocade chair. She did not speak during the interview, but she stayed after the detective had left, reassuring Eric in a comforting voice when he began to weep.
    Eric told them why he had made the trip down to the Hippie House. He told them he had not actually entered it; he had done nothing but push open the door. He had last been down there about the third week of September. Yes, he would try and remember the exact day. He would ask his sister, Emma, she would know. Of course lots of people knew about the Hippie House. His band had practiced there all summer, which is how it got its name. No, today he saw nothing unusual outside the shed that he could remember, everything was deep in snow. No tire tracks, ski tracks, nothing. He did not have any idea who the girl was, although he knew Katie Russell was missing. To be honest, he had seen her for no more than a second and really only knew that her hair was black.
    For now, Detective Mather had no more questions. As he stood to leave, his shadow fell across the door.
    â€œHow did she die?” my brother asked. I heard his voice break, but despite his fear, he wanted to know.
    Detective Mather was obviously hesitant to answer him for he did not say anything right away. They would have to wait for the results of the autopsy, but it looked like she had been strangled.
    â€œBut there was blood,” my brother commented. “A lot of blood. Around her neck.”
    â€œYes. It appears the cord was pulled very tight.”
    Eric was silent a moment, but then he asked another question that I knew was not due to morbid curiosity but the kind of detail I would expect him to ask.
    â€œWhat kind of cord was it?”
    â€œAgain, we won’t know until the autopsy is performed. It’s embedded quite deeply in the neck. But likely something quite fine. Like a piece of heavy gage wire.”
    â€œOr a guitar string,” I heard Eric say.
    Detective Mather’s shadow grew huge as he put on his coat. “Yes. Or a guitar string,” he agreed.
    My aunt and cousins stayed over that night. Somehow it seemed best that we remain together. Megan shared my large bed, where we slept very little but spoke of our fears until dawn.
    In the early hours of the morning I was returning from the bathroom when I noticed a light shining from beneath Eric’s bedroom door. I knocked, but after receiving no reply, I walked in with Halley following me. Eric sat at his desk. Using an Exacto knife, he was carving the wings for a model biplane from balsa wood. It was a hobby from when he was a child, and I had not seen him build one for several years. The double-hung window was wide open. Even in the cold, Eric was careful to keep the room ventilated when he was using the dope needed to strengthen the tissue paper that would cover the frame.
    Halley jumped on the bed and I sat down beside her. Eric did not look up from his work. For a moment, I looked at the many models lining his shelves and dangling from the ceiling, slowly circling in the air currents. I looked at the posters of musicians he had tacked on his walls. In one corner of his room stood an old radio he had refinished. Dad had discovered it in the barn when we’d first moved to Ruddy Duck Farm. Eric’s guitar was propped against it. My brother’s room was neat compared to mine, where thread and fabric chased dust from every corner. Only a paint-stained shirt and a braided guitar strap tossed beneath the window cluttered his floor.
    â€œYou found it,” I said.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThe guitar strap.”
    Eric shrugged, “It was under this pile of stuff on my desk.” Having completed one wing, he set it aside and began working on another. “I’m never going back there,” he