Read Online The Gatekeeper's Sons (The Gatekeeper's Trilogy) by Eva Pohler - Free Book Online Page B

a short brown leather skirt and brown knee-high boots. She had pale skin and blonde rogue curls falling from a high bun. Therese thought she saw a bird perched on the woman’s shoulder, but she couldn’t be sure, because Therese had turned around so quickly and ran so fast that she couldn’t be sure of what she had seen. She knew it was a woman, and that was all. A woman who had said her name.
    “Call the lieutenant! Call 911!” Therese cried to her aunt, who still sat on the wooden table looking out toward the reservoir. “But come inside! Lock the doors!”
    “Therese?” Carol jumped up. “What’s wrong?”
    “Come inside! Now! ”
    It seemed to take Carol forever and a day to follow Therese in through the kitchen door, but when she did, Therese slammed it shut, locked it, and turned the dead bolt, which was not easy because they hardly ever used it. Therese then ran to the front door and did the same. “Check the downstairs windows!” Therese yelled. “All of them!”
    “What is going on, Therese! Tell me what happened!”
    Why couldn’t grownups ever just do what kids asked of them without asking a million questions? “Please, Carol! I saw someone out there. She looked really weird. And she called my name.”
    Carol went to the bedrooms to check the locks on the windows, but not without saying, “Calm down, honey. It’s probably nothing. Maybe a neighbor you didn’t recognize?”
    Therese finished checking the last window and then found her aunt in the guest bedroom. She pointed a finger at her aunt and shouted, “You either think I’m paranoid or you’re acting brave because you think you need to for my benefit! Well, I think I have a right to be paranoid. And if you’re just acting brave, don’t.”
    She left the room and sat on the sofa, which faced the kitchen, and stared at the back door. Clifford jumped into her lap.
    “Therese, I’m sorry.” Carol crossed the room and s at on the other end of the sofa.
    “I know my own neighborhood,” Therese said, still worked up.
    “You’re right. I’ll call the lieutenant. I’m a little scared now, too.”
     
    It was dusk when the lieutenant arrived with another officer in tow. They came inside, accepted glasses of iced tea, and listened to Therese’s account of what happened earlier in the woods.
    The lieutenant said, “To be on the safe side, I’ll post an officer on guard for a week or so to keep an eye on the place. Officer Morgan here will stay tonight. I’ll see you both in the morning for the line up. Let Officer Morgan know if you hear or see anything the least bit suspicious to you, okay?”
    “We will,” Carol said, following the lieutenant to the door. “Thank you so much.”
    Officer Morgan slept on a cot on the back deck, so Therese felt a little more at ease, even though she couldn’t take Clifford out to pee without him barking up a storm.
    At night, when it was time to go to sleep, she was glad the officer was there below her on the deck outside. She lay there with Clifford and first thought of the fear. The woman had looked so strange. Even her voice was strange. Then Therese thought of the despair, and she fought off the panicky feeling until it won and she sobbed and sobbed until she finally fell asleep.
     
    Therese was riding on a carousel at a carnival on a painted horse rising up and down to accordion music when Hip appeared and said, “My brother is coming for you.”
    “But he said he’d kill me if he came to me,” Therese said.
    “Only when he’s acting as the guide for the dead. He’s getting our father to make me take over that loathsome job. I’m not looking forward to it, and I guess I have you to thank for it.”
    “I don’t get it. You’re going to be the new guide for the dead?”
    “Just temporarily, so Than can come for you.”
    “And then what?”
    Hip shrugged. “I think he wants you to become his queen of the dead.” Then he said, “Why don’t you become my queen instead?”
    Therese