All the Way Home Read Online Free PDF Page A

one of the occupants.
    He doesn’t need to know them yet. There will be plenty of time for that later.
    After all, he’ll be here all summer.
    Just as he was ten years ago.
    R ory hesitates outside the closed door in the third-floor hallway, her hand on the knob and her heart pounding.
    Then, after closing her eyes briefly, she turns the knob and pushes the door open.
    Nothing but blackness.
    She reaches out, feels along the wall to her right, just inside the doorway, until she finds the light switch. She flicks it and blinks at the burst of brightness overhead, then finds herself looking around at her sister’s old bedroom.
    A wave of emotion surges over her and she reaches out to grab the nearby desk for support.
    Oh, God, Carleen, she thinks, desperately missing the sister she has tried so hard to forget.
    She takes a deep breath to steady her emotions and notices that the air is hot and musty-smelling. She forces herself to look around.
    There, on the cluttered desk, is a Stephen King novel with a bookmark in place —The Shining . Carleen had been reading it that summer, Rory recalls. She was always reading something.
    The bookcase on the far wall of the room is packed with double rows of books, and more are stacked on the floor beside it. Some are mainstream fiction, and there are a few cherished classics and hardcovers among them; others are dog-eared young-adult paperbacks—mostly “sophisticated” books by authors like Avi and Richard Peck and Paul Zindel, rather than the Sweet Valley High series that takes up most of the shelf space in Rory’s room across the hall.
    Above the bookcase hangs a wooden crucifix, identical to those in every other bedroom in the house, placed there, of course, by Maura. Rory remembers being frightened, as a child, of the gory image of the blood-encrusted gaping wounds in Christ’s feet and hands. She swiftly moves her gaze past the crucifix even now, focusing on the wide dresser beside the bookcase.
    One drawer is ajar, as though someone has just grabbed something out of it and not bothered to close it all the way. Rory notes the dresser top is cluttered with cosmetics and hair clips and lotions, and she can see a round purple glass bottle that she recognizes as Carleen’s favorite perfume. Christian Dior’s Poison. Some boy had given it to her for her seventeenth birthday, and Carleen had bragged about how expensive it was. She used to douse herself in it, ignoring everyone’s wrinkled noses and comments that she was wearing too much.
    Over there on the bedside table is Carleen’s senior yearbook, and, tossed haphazardly on the floor, a familiar-looking maroon leather-bound document binder that Rory recognizes as her sister’s high school diploma. She herself got one just like it from Lake Charlotte High School the following year.
    There’s Carleen’s canopy bed, the one Mom and Daddy had bought her for her thirteenth birthday after she’d begged them. Rory, who had always believed her sister was Mom’s favorite anyway, had, of course, been jealous. But Carleen had generously allowed her to spend a few nights in the bed when she was away on a Girl Scout camping trip.
    That was back when Carleen was still herself, before . . .
    Well, before everything changed.
    Rory takes a few cautious steps into the room, noting that it’s just the way her sister left it ten years ago. Mom wouldn’t let anyone touch it after Carleen vanished, saying she wanted her room to be waiting the day she came back.
    And Daddy hadn’t argued.
    Maybe he, too, thought Carleen was coming back.
    Or maybe he knew how traumatic it would be for Mom to give up hoping.
    During the first few weeks and months after Carleen disappeared, there had occasionally been reason to think that maybe she was out there somewhere, alive; that maybe she had simply run away. Doug McShane, the detective in charge of the police investigation, said they had received tips from people who claimed to have seen her—but