Graveminder Read Online Free PDF Page B

clutched his shirt in her hands, holding him to her, so he kept his arms around her until her cries faded to sniffles.
    “Why?” She lifted her face and looked up at him. “Why is she dead?”
    But he didn’t have any more answers than she did. Ella had been acting strange the past few days. Without warning, she’d broken up with him in the morning. They’d never fought, never argued, and until that week, he’d thought she was happy.
    What happened?
    He’d hardly thought about anything else since she’d told him she was done with him. She hadn’t been angry, just sad. He didn’t tell Rebekkah any of that, not yet. In the span of a few days, he’d gone from having a girlfriend and a good friend, to being afraid he’d lose both of them because he and Rebekkah had kissed, to holding Rebekkah as they both tried to make sense of Ella’s death.
    Was it our fault?
    “Don’t leave me. Promise.” Rebekkah pushed away from him, but kept her hand fisted in his shirt as she stared at him. “She left us, and now ... She could’ve told us what was wrong. She could’ve told me anything. Why didn’t she tell me?”
    “I don’t know, Bek.”
    “Promise me, Byron.” Rebekkah wiped her cheeks angrily. “Promise you won’t keep secrets or leave or—”
    “I promise.” He felt a guilty twinge at how right it felt to make that promise to Rebekkah. Her sister, his girlfriend , was dead. Byron shouldn’t think of Rebekkah as anything but a friend—except that he had been thinking of her like that long before Ella had died.
    And Ella had known.
    “I promise,” he repeated. “No secrets, no leaving you. Ever.”
    It was Rebekkah who had left, not quite a year later. She’d left Claysville and left him.
    “How do I tell her you were killed , Maylene?” he asked the empty room.
    He opened the doors to the other rooms. The third bedroom, Ella’s old room, wasn’t made up. The bed sat in an anonymous room that was overfilled with clutter. Maylene hadn’t built a shrine to her dead granddaughter—nor had she done so with her dead son. The room that had been Jimmy’s was a storage room now. In it, there were more boxes and plenty of clutter, but no bed at all. Both Ella’s room and Jimmy’s room looked untouched by the murderer and by the townsfolk who’d cleaned the house.
    Byron went downstairs and grabbed the bottle of water. He let himself out, checked that the door was locked behind him—and then stopped.
    A teenage girl sat astride his bike, kicking her foot back and forth.
    “Hey!”
    She cocked her head. “Yeah?”
    “Off my bike.” He leaped off the porch and crossed the lawn, but when he reached her, he hesitated. Grabbing hold of a girl—regardless of the reason—wasn’t something to do lightly.
    She hopped up so her feet were tucked under her and then sprang backward, putting the bike between them. For a moment she stared at him. Her forehead furrowed in apparent confusion. “She’s dead. The woman that lives here.”
    “Do you know her?” Byron tried to place the girl, but he’d been back in Claysville only a few months, and he didn’t recall seeing her anywhere. She didn’t look like anyone he knew either, so he couldn’t peg her as someone’s daughter or sister.
    “They stopped bringing her milk.” The girl’s expression turned wistful as she stared past him to the porch. “Yesterday there was milk, and today there’s not. I’m hungry.”
    “I see.” Byron took in her frayed jeans and dirty face. There weren’t any homeless shelters in Claysville . He wasn’t sure if there was even a foster-care system. Relatives took in those that needed taking in, and neighbors handed over whatever extra they had to the folks who lacked.
    He opened his jacket and pulled out his phone. “Do you have a home? Relatives here in town? I can call someone to come for you.”
    “No, I’m not going anywhere. Not now,” she whispered.
    The skin at the back of Byron’s neck prickled, but when