Read Online Of Starlight by Dan Rix - Free Book Online Page B

made any sense.
    “Apparently, she hitchhiked to South Carolina to visit some kind of healer about her sleepwalking,” said Emory, chuckling. “That’s where she’s been this whole time.” 
    “In South Carolina?” I said in disbelief. “She’s been in South Carolina? For three months? And she didn’t call home once to let her family know she wasn’t dead?”
    “Leona, I literally just found out this morning that my baby sister is alive after thinking she was dead. I don’t know every little detail, okay? She said the healer insisted she come in secret, that they had some kind of arrangement. So yeah, if you ask me, I’d say this guy sounds shady as hell, but you know what? I’m not going to get on her case about that right now because I love her more than anybody on earth and I’m just grateful she’s alive. I called you because I thought you’d be grateful too. We can work out all the details later.”
    I winced at his words, mortified at my own callousness. “You’re right, I’m sorry,” I whispered. “This is . . . this is amazing. I’m really, really happy for you.”
    “I want you to come over for dinner tomorrow,” he said.
    “You . . . what? ” My heart jolted.
    “Yeah, I want you to get to know her.”
    Dinner. With Emory and his parents and the sister I’d murdered. The prospect brought instant terror. This couldn’t be allowed to happen. “Tomorrow? I . . . I can’t tomorrow . . .”
    “Be here at six,” he said, and hung up.
    I stared at the phone in my hand, too stunned to close my mouth.
    Megan tugged it out of my grip and pocketed it, startling me back to the present. “So . . . Ashley’s alive,” she said calmly. “That’s either really good or really bad.”
    She’d heard the entire conversation, no doubt.
    I shook my head, lifting my gaze to hers. “But we killed her,” I muttered. “She’s dead. She’s supposed to be dead.”
    “But she isn’t.”
    “But she was . We hit her going fifty miles per hour. You checked her pulse. We dragged her body into the woods and left her there. She was dead.”
    “Shh,” she said, glancing in the direction of the kitchen, where my mom was washing dishes. She rose to shut the door.  “Okay, let’s talk about this. Maybe she wasn’t really dead. Maybe she got up right after we left and hiked back to the road. Maybe that was why she was out there. She was hitchhiking.”
    But I saw her rotting corpse. “No, Megan. She was dead. I know she was dead.”
    Megan folded her arms and shrugged. “Then Emory just prank-called you and she’s not actually back.”
    “Why would he do that?” I said, lip curled. “That’s not funny, that’s morbid. Only you would think that’s funny.”
    “Then how else do you explain it?” she spat. “Either she’s alive, and we didn’t kill her, or she’s still dead and that wasn’t her on the phone. Make a choice.”
    “Maybe we killed someone else,” I murmured.
    “Someone else who looked exactly like Ashley?”
    “We don’t know that, Megan. It was dark. We were freaking out. Do you remember what she looked like? All I remember is she was blonde and pretty, but the rest is a blur.”
    “Not me,” said Megan. “I have a perfect image of her face burned in my brain.”
    “Because we saw pictures of Ashley afterward on the internet,” I said. “Sometimes the brain can do that. It changes your memories based on stuff you learn afterward to make things consistent. So we thought we killed Ashley, and later we remember the girl’s face as Ashley’s. That’s textbook psychology.”
    Megan stared at me. “So you think we killed someone else?”
    “I’m just saying it’s a possibility.”
    “Then two girls disappeared that night. How come we haven’t heard of the other one?”
    She had a point, but my mind was still too wound-up to stop and think. “Over the phone—you heard her—she didn’t sound like she remembered me. She was like, ‘uh . . .