Read Online Silence by Becca Fitzpatrick - Free Book Online

seats, and untimely habit the car’s stick shift had of popping out of the shifter. But still. It was
my
car. Had my mom given up on me so quickly after my disappearance that she’d started hocking my belongings on Craigslist? “What else?” I demanded. “What else did you sell while I was gone?”
    “I sold it before you went missing,” she murmured, eyes lowered.
    A swallow caught in my throat. Meaning once upon a time I’d known she’d sold my car, only I couldn’t remember it now. It was a painful reminder of just how defenseless I really was. I couldn’t even conduct a conversation with my mom without looking like an idiot. Rather than apologize, I flung open the front door and stomped down the porch steps.
    “Whose car is that?” I asked, coming up short. A white convertible Volkswagen sat on the cement slab where the Fiat used to reside. From the look of it, it had taken up permanent residence. It might have been there yesterday morning when we’d pulled in from the hospital, but I’d hardly been in the frame of mind to soak up my surroundings. The only other time I’d left the house was last night, and I’d gone out through the back door.
    “Yours.”
    “What do you mean, mine?” I shielded my eyes from the morning sun as I glowered back at her.
    “Scott Parnell gave it to you.”
    “Who?”
    “His family moved back to town at the beginning of summer.”
    “Scott?” I repeated, thumbing through my long-term memory, since the name provoked a vague recollection. “The boy in my kindergarten class? The one who moved to Portland years ago?”
    Mom nodded wearily.
    “Why would he give me a car?”
    “I never got the chance to ask you. You disappeared the night he dropped it off.”
    “I went missing the night Scott mysteriously donated a car to me? Didn’t that set off any alarm bells? There’s nothing normal about a teenage guy giving a car to a girl he hardly knows and hasn’t seen in years. Something about this isn’t right. Maybe—maybe the car was evidence of something, and he needed to get rid of it. Did that ever cross your mind?”
    “The police searched the car. They questioned the previous owner. But I think Detective Basso had ruled out Scott’s involvement after hearing your side of the night’s events. You’d been shot earlier, before you went missing, and while Detective Basso originally thought Scott was the shooter, you told him it was—”
    “Shot?” I shook my head in confusion. “What do you mean shot?”
    She closed her eyes briefly, exhaling. “With a gun.”
    “What?” How had Vee left this out?
    “At Delphic Amusement Park.” She shook her head. “I hate even thinking about it,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “I was out of town when I got the call. I didn’t make it back in time. I never saw you again, and I’ve regretted nothing in my life more. Before you disappeared, you told Detective Basso that a man named Rixon shot you in the fun house. You said Scott was there too, and Rixon also shot him. The police looked for Rixon, but itwas like he vanished. Detective Basso was convinced Rixon wasn’t even the shooter’s real name.”
    “Where was I shot?” I asked, my skin crawling with an unpleasant tingle. I hadn’t noticed a scar, or any indication of a wound.
    “Your left shoulder.” It seemed to pain my mom just to say it. “The shot was in and out, hitting only muscle. We’re very, very lucky.”
    I tugged my collar down over my shoulder. Sure enough, I could see scar tissue where the skin had healed.
    “The police spent weeks looking for Rixon. They read your diary, but you’d ripped out several pages, and they didn’t find his name in the rest of it. They asked Vee, but she denied ever having heard his name. He wasn’t in the records at school. There was no record of him at the DMV—”
    “I ripped out pages in my diary?” I cut in. It didn’t sound like me at all. Why would I do such a thing?
    “Do you remember where you