Dead Girls Don't Lie Read Online Free PDF Page A

than anything. I saw them move after Rachel went upstairs. I tried to convince myself that it was the wind or a mouse, something harmless, but my imagination kept coming up with things that were much worse.
    I stayed completely still, holding my breath, searching the dark for whatever or whoever might be there. Wondering if it would be better to follow Rachel or run through the door behind me and all the way back to her house. I stepped backward toward the door, feeling for the wall behind me. My hand touched something solid; I jerked it back. It was wet.
    I turned around to face a huge, dark circle. It had a symbol in the middle that looked like an eye glaring back at me. The paint was so fresh that it ran down the wall and clung to my hand where I had touched it, staining it red.
    Before I could process what the symbol might mean, Rachel’s scream pierced the darkness. I jerked my head back toward the stairs in front of me. Beyond them, the curtains moved again. For a heartbeat I saw something white, the number eighteen and a face. Then the curtains parted and someone disappeared into their folds.
    Rachel screamed again.
    I was so terrified that I couldn’t move. I was too scared toeven run away. She ran to the bottom of the stairs before I could get to her. I could tell her foot was bleeding, but she didn’t stop. “We have to get out of here now!” She took my hand when I didn’t move, dragging me out the door, down the stairs, and through the woods. I knew she was hurt, but she ran like she wasn’t. By the time we got to her house, her foot was covered in little rocks, dirt, and leaves, all clinging to the sticky blood. Her hands were covered in blood. There was even blood in her hair and on her T-shirt—too much blood to have been from the cut on her foot. She was whispering something in Spanish over and over that I didn’t understand, “ Lo atraparon .”
    She washed her foot and wrapped it in a bandage. She threw her clothes into the washer. She cleaned every speck of blood off the floor with a washcloth, threw that into the washer, and added a ton of bleach. She washed her hands over and over again, and when she saw the paint she made me wash mine too.
    I rub my hand against my cutoff shorts, trying to erase the paint stain from my memory. I have to swallow back a gag because I can almost smell paint now. I look sideways through the window. I can’t get the right angle to see if the circle or any of the other markings are still there, so I go to the other side of the porch and look through the window framed by the tattered drapes.
    My face reflects back to me from a dusty mirror on the other side of the room. It’s a distorted, ghostly image. The mirror is cracked and missing pieces. The shattered glass on thefloor is reflecting chunks of light on to the ceiling. I turn my head, wondering if the symbol on the wall is still there, wondering if Rachel’s blood is still soaked into the wood on the stairs, like in my dream. I wonder if there’s blood on the floor upstairs.
    Mom picked me up the next morning for our end-of-summer visit, one of the few that didn’t have to be rescheduled. I found out after school started that a Mexican kid had been murdered in the upstairs bedroom of the old house. The notice that grief counselors were available for anyone who had known him was tucked in with the emergency information cards, club info, and picture order forms we got at the beginning of the school year. I asked a dumb question about it when someone brought it up in advisory, and Claire looked at me like I was a moron. “You really have been living under a rock, haven’t you?” She was ruder back then, before we became friends again.
    I didn’t know very much about the boy who was murdered. Just that he was from L.A. and living with relatives here. It didn’t seem like anyone knew him. He had moved to Lake Ridge sometime during the summer. I looked up the news story on the school’s computer. It said he