Read Online Sorrow Road by Julia Keller - Free Book Online Page A

those relatives, she explained, she had realized that you can’t make people be what they don’t want to be. You just have to live your life somewhere else. It’s not worth the energy to be angry and upset all the time. Skylar could not imagine why anybody would want to go back to a tiny mountain town in the middle of nowhere, once she had managed to get out.
    Especially not after Carla told her what she had gone through there.
    But Carla persisted. “I’m going,” she had said. “First thing tomorrow. It’s what I have to do, okay?”
    She did not tell Kurt and Skylar the rest of the story: I’m afraid I’m losing my mind. And when she did lose her mind, she wanted to be in a place where they knew her. She wouldn’t be able to tell her mother what was really going on—Bell would feel responsible, she would feel guilty about it all, and Carla could not do that to her, and nor could Carla deal with her mother’s apologies and her sadness—but she wanted to be home.
    No. She needed to be home.
    Her cell rang. When she’d started out that morning, Carla had flipped it onto the passenger seat, and it landed on top of her backpack. The backpack was surrounded by a fringed blue flannel scarf and a pair of gloves and, as of an hour ago, an unopened can of Diet Coke.
    She took a quick glance at the lighted screen.
    The caller ID made her shudder.
    She did not touch the phone. The rings continued. Carla had intended to shut off the damned thing, but forgot. She stared straight ahead with an extra intensity, like someone ignoring a heckler.
    She had made a mess out of everything. An absolute fucking mess. She could blame the chaos in her head, but the truth was, a few days before, she had done something really, really stupid. More stupid than usual. That’s what this call was about.
    She knew she would have to face the consequences. Eventually.
    For now, all she wanted to think about was the big stone house on Shelton Avenue. She pictured the wraparound front porch, and the lopsided porch swing, and the ginormous wooden door with the tarnished brass knocker that sometimes reminded her of the one in the Christmas Carol movie—the one that morphed into Jacob Marley’s pinched and squinty face. The knocker on the door at Shelton Avenue, though, was not creepy. It was not forbidding. It was heavy and old-fashioned and sort of cool.
    And the sight of it would mean she was home.
    She wondered if her mother had shoveled the long front walk yet. Carla hoped not. The moment she got back, she wanted to plunge into something physically demanding, even grueling, something that would leave her totally wrecked with exhaustion, blitzed with bone-deep, brain-numbing fatigue, so that at long last she would have a chance—unlikely as it seemed right now—to actually sleep all the way through the night. Just one night, freed from her memories. That’s all. That’s all she wanted.
    Those memories would be waiting for her the next morning, of course, ready to pounce. She knew that. But she would be stronger, after a long good rest. She would be able to deal. To fight back. Yes, she would.
    Wouldn’t she?

 
    Chapter Four
    There were two kinds of drunks. The first kind lurched through the world with no shame. They made no attempt to hide the extent of their dependence on alcohol, a dependence that had begun the very first time they took a drink and felt that astonishing calm that canceled out all of their anxieties, pushed away all of the awkwardness and the insecurities; it left them shining, elevated, the true self revealed at last.
    And the second kind was—
    Bell paused. Damn, it was cold out here. Deputy Oakes had left an hour ago, having exhausted his supply of bad news, and now she was trying to clear the front walk. With every shovelful, she tunneled deeper into the heart of her thoughts about Darlene Strayer. Which meant she also chipped and picked