Read Online Strange but True by John Searles - Free Book Online Page A

chairs, plus a decent-size living room and bedroom. It even has a basement with a washer and dryer, instead of a crawl space like the one beneath her cottage. Farthest from the road, closest to the woods, is the vacant house that has never been winterized. All three used to be hunting cabins in the 1940s and were abandoned until the Erwins retired from the police department—she was a dispatcher, he was an officer—and bought the property as an investment.
    Melissa leans forward and spots the soft yellow glow of the lamp beside their bed. She can picture them inside, snug beneath the covers, pillows fluffed behind their heads as Mr. Erwin reads one of those books of funny facts he loves so much and Mrs. Erwin turns the pages of a Mary Higgins Clark novel, trying to guess the killer. Even though Melissa is tempted to knock on their door the way she does when she needs to talk, she stops herself. She hasn’t told them the truth about the baby. Instead, she made up a story about a boy she was seeing who took off the moment she became pregnant. The lie would make it difficult to explain to them what’s bothering her tonight.
    Finally, she rolls up the window and gets out of her car. When she opens the front door of her cottage, the stubborn smell of stale cigarette smoke lingers in the air, though she quit months before, when she first realized she was pregnant. Melissa steps inside and Mumu, her cow-spotted cat, winds between her legs, purring. She scoops him up in her arms and buries her scarred face in the animal’s soft fur. Mumu is the pet her parents gave her as a sort of consolation prize for the way they treated her after Ronnie died. He is one of the few things that she took with her when she left home. Melissa keeps on nuzzling until the cat has had enough and leaps from her arms, then pads off into the bedroom. That’s when she turns on the light and looks around at the messy stack of newspapers on the coffee table, the baskets of tapes and books by the ripped sofa, her clothes strewn everywhere, a row of empty wine bottles on the floor by the kitchenette.
    With one hand on her queasy stomach, Melissa steps over a pair of dirty black stretch pants and goes to the mantel of the stone fireplace, where there are even more pictures of Ronnie. She picks up one that is identical to a photo on her dashboard. He is on the plaid blanket they used to keep stashed in the darkroom. As she stares down at his starry smile and bright eyes, Melissa feels something slip inside of her. All the books she has read about communicating with the other side, and all the psychics she has visited, say the same thing: if you talk to the dead, they will listen. So instead of allowing herself to buckle again, Melissa speaks to Ronnie the way she often does late at night.
    She tells him that she finally worked up the courage to go to his family.
    She tells him how disappointed she was that his father wasn’t there, since she hoped to see him most of all.
    She tells him that his brother was hurt in an accident.
    She tells him about the way his mother screamed at her when she broke the news.
    She fills him in on every last detail of the night until her feet grow sore from standing there so long. Melissa carries the picture to the sofa, stretches her body out on the scratchy cushions, and rests the frame facedown on the mound of her stomach. “Your mother is so different now,” she says into the empty room as she gazes up at the stain-blotched ceiling. “Do you remember how happy she used to seem?”
    As Melissa loses herself in the memory of the first time she met Charlene, her heavy eyes flutter shut. Her mumbling grows hoarse and incomprehensible in the retelling. She and Ronnie had snuck out of school and gone to see his mother at the Radnor library for diesel money for the old Mercedes. His parents had taken away his credit card to punish him for buying the car on a Visa in the first place, so he was