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

always in need of cash. Behind the counter stood a big-breasted librarian with two blond curls sweeping up from the top of her forehead. She reminded Melissa of one of those women from a Cross Your Heart bra commercial, her mammoth breasts lifted and separated beneath a fuzzy blue sweater. When she looked up and smiled at Ronnie, Melissa assumed it was his mother. But then she pointed and told them in a harsh, unfamiliar accent that fused all her words into one, “Charleneisinthestacks.” Melissa felt relieved, because there was something unlikable about this lady, though she couldn’t name what it was. She followed Ronnie through the maze of shelves, alternating between staring at the back of his faded Levi’s and glancing up at the titles of obscure books, until they spotted his real mother, standing atop a metal stepladder with small holes like a cheese grater on the surface of each step. She was dressed in a pleated blue skirt and blazer, a gold frog pinned to her lapel. Before she noticed them, Ronnie took Melissa’s hand and led her around to the other side, where he proceeded to push the book Charlene had just shelved back in her direction so that it fell to the floor. His mother climbed down the ladder, picked it up, and reshelved it, only to have Ronnie shove the book back out again. It was just the sort of prank that would infuriate her own humorless parents, but Charlene stuck her arm through the shelf and grabbed Ronnie by the wrist. “Ronald Chase, I hereby place you under library arrest!” she said, and the two of them started to laugh.
    As the sound of their laughter echoes in Melissa’s memory now, the image of that moment fades to a gauzy white nothing in her mind. She feels as though she is falling, like that book Ronnie pushed from the edge, only instead of dropping quickly to the floor, she is plummeting through a long tunnel, falling and falling and falling, until finally, she is asleep.
    Melissa begins to snore, a habit that came with the pregnancy, and her arm inadvertently stretches out so that her hand comes to rest on the coffee table beside that messy pile of newspapers. Upon first glance, someone visiting this cottage might look at those papers and assume they are nothing more than leftovers from recent weeks, yet to make their way to the recycling bin. But if that someone—say it was you—were to look closer, you would notice that every single one of those papers has the same date at the top: June 19, 1999. What’s more, you would see that they all have the same black-and-white photo on the front page of a limousine crushed into a thick oak tree on Blatts Farm Hill.
    And now that you are looking, downright snooping in fact, do you see what’s right next to those newspapers? It is the decoy diary Melissa used to fool her father five years before. And next to that? A newer, black leather diary with Melissa’s name emblazoned in gold enamel on the front, a gift from her sister just before they stopped speaking. For my sister and best friend , the inscription reads. Although it doesn’t seem like it now, you will start over, and you will be happy again one day. I promise. Love, Stacy
    All of the pages are blank.
    Across the room, there is that row of wine bottles in the kitchenette—their lips sticky with old wine, their bottoms filled with sediment and sludge—every one of them from more than nine months before, when Melissa spent lonely nights like this getting drunk and smoking cigarettes on the sofa before spewing prayer after endless prayer on the floor beside her bed.
    Just to the right of those bottles is a small white refrigerator with a freezer compartment big enough for two empty ice trays, a sack of Starbucks coffee, and one more thing shoved way in the back. If you push aside those trays and that coffee and reach your hand deep inside, you’ll pull out a red, freezer-burned clump that will be unidentifiable unless you hold