Dead Americans Read Online Free PDF

out, fingers wide, projecting as little threat as he could. “How did you hear I was looking for you?”
    “I heard you.”
    “Heard?”
    “Yes.” She had yet to raise the gun, but he noted that her feet kept moving, agitated. “It was all I heard today.”
    Taking a step forward, Williams said, “Your Mum—”
    “She’s not my mother!” Sarah cut him off loudly, her right arm, the arm that held that gun, twitching suddenly, and causing him to tense, to halt his second step. “I could hear you, Sheriff. Hear you in your office, in the street, in your truck, wanting me to come and see you. Pleading with me. Telling me to walk through the door, to hand you an answer.”
    Unable to say anything else, he said, “This is not my office.”
    “No.” She smiled, a queer, disconcerting smile. “I have some choice over what I do now. I have some free will. You’re not—”
    “Sarah.”
    “Amanda,” she said. “I was going to say Amanda.”
    “She’s dead.”
    “I know.”
    “You.” He paused, then mentally shrugged, took another step forward, and said, “You killed her?”
    Sarah’s strange smile evaporated and a frown, a tiny turn of her lips, a sign of genuine regret, emerged in its place. “Not on purpose. She—she wanted to hurt herself so badly. She wanted to punish herself. It was after the gig at Jacob’s, because of that. It was meant to go differently!” She shook her head. “She was so sure of that. She knew it. She
believed
it. We weren’t meant to be booed off stage. We were supposed to be loved—but when that didn’t happen, she blamed herself. She hadn’t believed enough, she said. It made her so angry.”
    “I heard that was you.”
    The regret flashed away: the eye in her emotional cyclone. “Yes. I suppose you did.”
    He continued forward, slowly. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on here? Why no one remembers you?”
    “No.”
    She shot him.
    Once, then twice, but not, he thought as he fell, not a third time.
    “I don’t need people to tell me what to do,” he heard her say. “I don’t need their thoughts in mine, not now. Without her around, there’s no one to force people to remember me. No one to force me to remember things I never did. To feel things I never felt. Do you know what that’s like? When she was angry, I was angry. When she hated someone, I hated someone. She got to be free of it, but not me, no. No. It was like she really did just make me up one day to be everything she didn’t like about herself.” She was standing above him now, and he looked up, looked at her from where he sat crumpled in the gravel, but could not really see her. His focus was on the blood flowing from his stomach, on the difficulty he had swallowing. But her smile, that queer smile from before, returned to her face as he looked up and it was, even distracted as he was, he was sure that it was the sign of her derangement, of her broken psyche, of the reason why she killed her sister. “No,” her voice was muffled, and it seemed that she was answering him, but he hadn’t spoken, for once, he hadn’t. “That’s not true. She really did make me up, to be what she couldn’t be. So she could make that music that no one liked. That was the crazy part.”
But it Made Him Think of You
    When she was gone, he lay there on the gravel, dying.
    No one had come to him, but even though he found it difficult to focus, he wasn’t surprised. They should stay inside. They should stay where it was safe. Still, he thought. Still, if one of those people in any of the blurry-lit houses could call an ambulance, that wouldn’t hurt . . . but he did not say it. What did it matter? He wouldn’t die with gritted teeth like Amanda Currie. There was no reason for him to do so—and that, he realized, there, the end of his epiphany, the final part, was why she had dug under his skin. The intensity that everyone had spoke of, her desire to be a musician, it was there, even in death, marking