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auren hadn’t wanted to ride her bike after finding the bloody handprint on the seat, but she finally conceded that it would take longer to walk it home. Plus, if she walked it and someone else came along the road they might notice the
blood.
She didn’t have a tissue or anything to wipe it off, so she grabbed a handful of dirt and scrubbed it over the seat until the print was distorted. This left her hands both dirty and bloody, but she scrubbed them on her cutoffs as best she could and thought that it just looked like mud.
Her mother would no doubt complain about the stains on her shorts, but then her mother complained about every little thing Lauren did, so what else was new?
She sat carefully on the bike seat and tried not to think about what was on her hands and under the back p
Miranda had already decided that she was going to lose her virginity with Tad. It was such a weird way of thinking of it, she thought—losing her virginity. Like she was going to accidentally leave it somewhere.She’d heard a lot of girls her age say they were “saving” it for “someone special,” but Miranda saw her hymen as a burden that she wanted to be rid of as soon as possible.Everyone knew that older guys only dated girls who put out, and Miranda was not going to waste her time with some loser freshman. She wanted a junior or a senior, somebody with a car who could take her places that weren’t in Smiths Hollow.After the Dream Machine, Tad and Billy had decided to head over to the pizzeria where they both worked, because they could get discounted
Richard Touhy III was the mayor of Smiths Hollow, like his father Richard before him and his father Richard beforehim. In fact, Richard Touhy III could trace an unbroken line of mayors named Touhy all the way back to the first mayor of Smiths Hollow, a man appointed by the Chicago baron who’d either saved the town from ruin or built it from the ground up, depending on who you talked to.At the moment he very much wished that his father and his father before him had worked at the canned chili factory like everyone else in town. It would be a blessing to worry about nothing more complicated than the mortgage and his union dues and whether his wife was boffing the postman.He was pretty certain, as a matter of fact, that his wife, Crystal, was boffing someone while he sat in his
Karen watched Lauren scrubbing the glass dish that had held the baked chicken legs they’d eaten for dinner. She felt the criticism rise up in her throat—Lauren wasn’t cleaning the corners very well, and if you didn’t get that off, there wasbuildup—but she swallowed it down again. Lauren was barely speaking to her as it was, after Karen’s outburst that afternoon.The thing was, Karen knew when she was being ridiculous. She knew that half of what she said to Lauren was just nitpicking, that Lauren was basically a good kid and that every time Karen gave her a hard time for no particular reason, she was driving her daughter further and further away.But she would see Lauren doing something that was just a little bit off, or thoughtless—like leaving the water on the fl
Miranda toyed with the French fries Tad had left on the table and swallowed the tears that she felt building in her throat. She was not going to cry in a public place, especially not with those bitches looking over at her every fewminutes.She didn’t understand what had gone wrong. Tad ditched Billy at the pizza place, just like Miranda hoped, and when they got in the Camaro he’d kissed her and even did a quick grope of her breasts before grinning and starting the engine.When they arrived at the mall they’d discovered that the next showing of Rambo wasn’t for an hour, so they decided to walk around for a while. Tad had put his hand in the back pocket of Miranda’s jeans while they did so and she did not object, letting him squeeze her ass whenever the impulse oc
Lauren didn’t expect to hear from Miranda the next day at all. She assumed her friend would be so irritated at Lauren for ditching her at the Dream Machine that Miranda wouldn’t call for at least a week. So she was surprised when thephone rang right after breakfast and Miranda’s voice said, “Meet me by the old ghost tree.”“I can’t,” Lauren said, which was true. “Mom went shopping in Silver Lake and I’m watching David.” “Lame.” Miranda huffed out an annoyed breath. “After lunch?”“Probably,” Lauren said, although she didn’t particularly want to meet Miranda. She had no desire to get dragged off to the arcade again. “She should be back by then. Listen, we’re not going to the Dream Machine, are we?
Alex Lopez sat at his desk and forced himself to think of the girls. Specifically, the girls’ heads talking to him.Because it was a very strange thing. He found that if he didn’t think of that exact moment, didn’t hear their voices and see their mouths moving, his brain would slide away from the memory of the crime scene.Like it was trying to forget that it ever happened.Like something was trying to make Alex forget it ever happened.And when he mentioned the fruitless search that he’d done yesterday for the girls’ car to Van Christie, it had taken the chief a minute to remember what Alex was even talking about.“Oh, right,” Christie said. “The mayor wants us to keep this as quiet as we can. He’s worried about the summer fair.&rdqu
Lauren and David’s grandmother called just after their mom got home from her shopping expedition. Lauren put four cans of store-brand green beans on the floor (she was transporting them to the pantry) and picked up the phone. “Hello, Lauren?” Their grandmother didn’t sound like a frail, fluffy old lady. She had the kind of commanding voice thatmade everyone in the vicinity stand at attention and obey whether they meant to or not. She never bossed Lauren around, but Lauren bet it wasn’t easy for her mom growing up.“Hi, Nana,” she said.Her mom looked up from the paper bag she was unloading and gestured for the phone. “Do you want to talk to Mom?”“No, not right now,” Nana said. “Lauren, do you think you could come and visit me this afte
There was a hill just off the center of town, a lonely and inexplicable hill: a hill that should not be, for it blighted an otherwise perfectly flat and reasonable landscape.The hill—and the house that sat upon it—watched over the people and buildings below, though it was the kind of gaze that left the back of one’s neck prickly and uncomfortable.Without this hill it was just an ordinary Midwestern burg, a town that appeared almost magically when coal was discovered nearby and the rich barons from Chicago needed men to dig it up.But the vein ran dry faster than in other parts of Illinois, and many of the men who came to dig went elsewhere to do their work, and the town became nothing but a dirt strip in between empty storefronts. The few people that remained spoke hopefully of one