All the Things You Are Read Online Free PDF

harm.
    Forget about bad guys. Kids probably killed Mr Smith, some kind of horrible Halloween prank. Vicious kids; spoilt, decadent rich kids, high on drugs, too impatient for Freakfest tomorrow night, goading each other into cruelty and wickedness. Just kids.
    Approaching the house, she tries Donna’s number again, with the same result as before. She parks the Pacifica outside the big wrought-iron gates and hits the buzzer once, twice, three times. The house is not visible from here, and there’s no sign of light in the garden. Maybe they’re all on the lake side. Maybe they’ve all gone to bed. She buzzes a fourth, fifth time, and leans on it. Nothing.
    Maybe Donna’s away. If so, Claire doesn’t have a clue where she might be. She doesn’t really know very much about her sister-in-law, and doesn’t want to know any more than she knows. There was a time when they might have made friends. Claire can see that, despite her sharp tongue and fearsome temper, Donna is funny and smart and a good aunt to the girls – strict but fair, like an old-style teacher, in fact, which is what she would probably have been in another age, an age before drugs and biker gangs and serial monogamy. When Claire and Danny married, she could have done with a strict-but-fair presence to help her settle, an older sister who could have given her familial advice and whose know-it-all bossiness she would have enjoyed resenting. But Donna was either indifferent or actively unpleasant, more like Danny’s ex-wife than his sister. It’s not impossible to dislike someone at first and later become her friend – she flashes on the title of Barbara’s first Beacon Street Girls book:
Worst Enemies/Best Friends
– and Claire certainly feels she gave it a good shot with Donna, above and beyond. But there’s a point you reach with someone where you realize that even if you wanted to forgive her, you’re no longer capable. The nerve endings are trashed, the synapses have been burned away, the affection cannot be restored. It’s good that the girls have an aunt, have any family at all beyond her and Danny, and it’s clear that Donna is trustworthy and responsible. And that’s the end of it.
    No one home, Claire says aloud into the crisp night air. She shivers, releases the buzzer and sits back in the car. She tries Danny’s cell again, redials half a dozen times, hangs up without leaving a message. There’s no one else to call. There’s nowhere else to go except home. But nobody’s home, at home.
Where are you?
    â€˜So which is it, sweetheart: you want to call the cops, you don’t want to call the cops, or you’re not sure either way? Because a decision always brings relief. Unless, of course, it doesn’t. Tell you what: while you’re deliberating, have another drink.’
    Dee is here, at least. When Claire got back, she hoped the whole thing might have been, if not quite a dream, at least a mistake; there’d be a removals truck in the drive, Danny and the kids in the house and an explanation for everything. But everything was just as mysterious and empty as it had been, and that’s when she cracked and called Dee, her best friend, who joins her now on the couch because Claire is not so much crying again as leaking a little, and instead of giving her a shoulder, goes for the upward-palms-cupping-the-elbows, gently-rocking, come-on-now, grief-coach approach.
    The couch is upstairs in the tower. At first Claire figured the removals guys didn’t take it because it would have had to come out the window by winch, since that’s the way it came in, the spiral staircase barely wide enough for one person not being nearly wide enough for a couch. But then she saw that everything else was here as well: her theater posters and photos and mementoes, all her plays and bound playscripts, everything from Chicago, and before. All the things she used to be.
    Once