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

said.
    â€œI wouldn’t either if I were you.”
    How strange it was to hear voices conferring, police radios crackling and car doors slamming outside our quiet farmhouse in the small hours on a cold winter night. How odd to have the dark sky washed in floodlights when we were used to only the small pool of yellow light cast from the lamp in our yard.
    â€œWas it really awful?”
    â€œYes,” was all he said.
    â€œI wish I didn’t know her.”
    â€œYeah, well, you didn’t know her very well. And anyway, it’s not you. Or Megan. It could have been, you know.”
    The thought had already occurred to both Megan and me. “But the killer must be from around here. The killer must be somebody we know.”
    â€œEmma, nobody in Pike Creek would do that. Nobody that we know would do what I saw down there.”
    â€œBut how else would he know about the Hippie House?”
    Sighing heavily, my brother set the Exacto knife aside. “I don’t know.”
    Eric didn’t know, but he did believe that it was someone who had been out to the Hippie House. It was a thought that would torment him for many months to come.

4
    I T WAS TWO WEEKS before the farm became ours again. By then, investigators had removed most of the floorboards as well as the center post from the Hippie House. This meant that if the building wasn’t torn down, it would eventually collapse on its own. So for safety’s sake, among all other reasons, my father and uncle pulled it down. It was a task they insisted on doing themselves and completed in half a day.
    I was immediately relieved of some of my chores, those that took me out of sight of the house. Dad would take them over for now. I was instructed to stay close to the farmhouse at all times, and my parents would not allow me to walk down the lane to catch the bus on my own.
    Trudging through a fresh layer of snow behind Eric one morning, I thought about how swiftly Katie had disappeared. She worked only ten minutes from where she lived, yet in that short time she had been abducted without a witness. It occurred to me how foolish I had been. I had never even considered the potential danger in what I’d assumed were normal activities. How many hours had I tempted fate by lingering on the road, alone, at the end of this lane? And during the summer there werethe many times I had ridden between farms on my bike—spaces of time when I could so easily have been snatched like Katie, never to be seen again. At least not alive. In that moment, the vision I had of my life moving forward, unhampered, in a direction only I would determine, crumbled. Life transformed into something so fleeting and fragile it sent a shiver up my spine.
    In the days following the murder, locks that had never been used were oiled and tested, and sales of locksets in hardware stores boomed. Dogs accustomed to lying on warm rugs in second-storey bedrooms suddenly found themselves expected to work, assigned to the cold linoleum next to a door. Lights remained on at all times, so that strangers driving through the area must have wondered what we were celebrating, why even in the early hours of the morning the farmhouses along the dark roads were ablaze.
    Alarms and home security systems were not common at the time, so rudimentary ones were created. Sitting on the goatskin rug, Hetty and Ruby and I strung what seemed like miles of soda pop cans together. But miles of them were needed if they were to circle the entire castle where, hanging six inches from the ground, they would trip unwary visitors, alerting the people inside.
    Not surprisingly, Katie’s murder was the topic of discussion on street corners, in coffee shops, at local functions and in the halls at school. News reports and rumors were often combined, elaborated upon until the line between reality and truth became obscure. The body had been mutilated beyond recognition. Katie’s watch—although some said it