All the Way Home Read Online Free PDF

then, nothing ever came of any of the information.
    And, as Daddy said, the world is full of crackpots and sickos.
    Rory remembers the night she had answered the phone to hear a girl’s voice, a girl claiming to be Carleen. And her heart had leapt into her throat even though it didn’t sound like her sister’s voice, and she was momentarily fooled until the girl burst into a fit of giggles, and she realized it was just some kids playing a prank.
    Another time a psychic showed up at the door and told Mom she had a message from Carleen. She said Carleen was alive and being held in an underground dungeon by a stranger. For two hundred dollars, she would describe the stranger and provide his initials.
    Mom, the devout Catholic who should have known better than to believe in occult mumbo jumbo, would have given her the two hundred dollars if Daddy hadn’t come home right then and thrown the so-called psychic out.
    Rory still remembers how the woman had scurried to her car parked out at the curb as Mom wailed helplessly and Daddy yelled.
    “Don’t you think I want to believe she’s alive someplace?” he had hollered at Mom after the psychic had driven away. “Don’t you think that my heart jumps every time Doug McShane calls and says he’s got another tip from someone who says they saw her?”
    And that was when Rory, who was crouched at the top of the stairs listening, had realized her father thought Carleen was dead.
    That was when she allowed herself to believe it, too.
    And after that, she had never set foot inside Carleen’s room again. She knew it would be too painful to see everything waiting for her, as if she were coming back.
    Now, after ten years, the pain has dulled somewhat to a hollow ache. Now she’s an adult. Now she can stand here and look at her sister’s room and mourn the loss of someone she had once loved, but she isn’t paralyzed with grief the way she once might have been.
    Now there’s only this deep-seated sadness.
    And, of course, the mystery.
    What happened to you, Carleen?
    And to you, Emily?
    She reaches into the neck of her T-shirt and pulls out a locket on a chain, fingering it absently as she thinks about her sister. Then, realizing the room is unbearably warm, she steps over to the window and tugs on it. After a few tries, it begins to raise with the reluctant, squeaky groan of wood scraping along wood.
    The air outside is hardly cool, but not nearly as stifling as it is in here. Rory inhales the sweet scent of honeysuckle blossoms from the sprawling hedge two stories below.
    She stands looking down at the side yard, remembering how she and Carleen used to spread their Barbie dolls in the shade of the big oak tree just inside the fence. They would play there for hours, trading clothes and setting up elaborate Barbie houses among the gnarled roots jutting out from the base of the tree.
    Carleen had the best ideas, Rory remembers, smiling faintly. She was always staging a Barbie wedding or sending her Ken off to war. And I would forget to play with my own dolls. I would end up sitting there, watching the scenes she created with hers , like the audience at a show .
    If her sister had lived, Rory thinks wistfully, she might have become an actress. Or maybe an interior decorator—she was a genius at designing her Barbie houses, turning postage stamps into framed “prints” for the walls and propping plastic coffee can lids on spools to create tables.
    A sudden, involuntary shudder takes Rory by surprise.
    She stares out into the twilight below, feeling as if something startled her, when there’s nothing to see but a deserted yard.
    Then she catches a glimpse of movement out of the corner of her eye. Turning her head, she sees the dark silhouette of a person moving along the sidewalk beyond the black iron fence.
    It appears to be a man, and he’s walking slowly, his head turned in Rory’s direction, almost as if he sees her standing up here in the window.
    He might, she realizes,