Dead Americans Read Online Free PDF Page A

Helen?”
    “I’m sorry, Sheriff, but she’s asleep. I’d rather not wake her—it’s been hard, y’know?”
    He sympathized, but still couldn’t pick the voice. “That’s fine. Who am I speaking with?”
    “Robert Hicks.”
    A big, fatty man, caught twice for speeding, once for drunk driving. “Hi, Rob. Think you might help me? I’m trying to track down who Sarah lived with before coming to Red Grove?”
    “She lived in Yermo with Helen.”
    “Didn’t live with aunt or nothing?”
    “Kinda grief she gives, I wish she had, but no.”
    After the phone clicked, a solitary piece of punctuation to end his theory, Williams picked up the photo again.
    “Fuck me,” he said, finally, and tossed it across the room with a defeated flick.
    He left it in the corner, a coloured, useless memory, and left the office to head home. The day was just about done, anyhow, but mostly he just couldn’t handle another moment sitting in that chair, calling people, hearing them tell him they didn’t know Sarah, and feeling his frustration grow. It was enough to make a man with a borderline drinking problem think he’d pushed himself across that line. Still, when he climbed into his sun-warmed truck and found the Dried Flowers album still on the passenger seat, he couldn’t resist opening it, just to double check that Sarah was still on the inside. She was, of course, and that frustrated him more. Maybe this frustration was what detectives in fiction felt? He’d never been a big reader, but the thought, now there, left him feeling as if he’d missed a way to solve his problem. He even had books that he could consult, bought by his wife before they left for L.A., and still unread. Their library, despite best intentions, had been a pristine one, and she had left it with him when she took his son and her new clothes, and he thought—“It isn’t going to help, idiot”—that they might provide a way for him to find his answer.
    It was desperation, nothing more, he knew. Chances were that in the morning he would be back to wishing that Sarah would simply walk into his office off the street, which was worse than looking through detective novels for answers. In truth, he knew what he should do, which was to call the county’s office, tell them what happened, and have them send someone who had dealt with this kind of thing before. He wouldn’t, though. He couldn’t. Not yet. The two girls had dug under his impersonality, his purposeful deadening of emotions in relation to his job and, as he drove through the darkened Bale Street on which he lived, he knew that he would not be able to let it go. In fact—
    He stopped.
    Literally.
    He jammed his foot on the brake and jerked his truck to stop half way up his driveway.
    There, in front of his squat, tin roofed, dark house, sat Sarah Currie. She was on the cement stairs, a thick backpack next to her, and a series of cigarette butts at her feet. She was wearing brown and orange, earthy colours, and no black; but there was no time to linger over that realization than the quick, subconscious note he made, because as his truck stopped, as the lights illuminated her, she rose to her feet, taller than what he imagined, and with a small, black pistol in her hand. Upon seeing that, there was a moment, just one, where before he turned the engine off, before the lights flicked off, he thought that he should put the truck in reverse. He should stomp on the gas, call Steve, get the gun he left locked in his office and . . . but he didn’t, even though he knew she had killed her sister, even though he knew it possible that she could kill him, he didn’t.
    His hard soled shoes hit the gravel. “Sarah Currie,” he said, trying to place as much authority in his voice as he could. “I’ve been looking for you.”
    “I know.”
    “You want to put down the gun?”
    “No.” She sounded controlled, confident, unphased by his tone. “Stay by your truck, too.”
    “Okay.” He put his palms