In the Waning Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the wind. The skirts of conifers swirled.
    She stared at the sign, an unspecified dread mounting in her, forgotten neurons reawakening with fear, drawing her mind down the stairs into the cobwebby murk of her own subconscious. Once the happy hamlet of her youth, Shelter Bay was now a Stephen King-ish town in her memory, a place where blackness lurked below a cracked tourist facade.
    And we all know what happens to heroines who go down the stairs into the basement, candle quavering . . .
    “That’s where it first went wrong,” she said softly into the mic. “If I’d told Mom and Dad right away that Sherry had gone with him to the spit, instead of going to find her myself, to warn her to hurry home. Save her bacon—” She cleared her throat, beating back tension by speaking louder into the darkness, against the squeak and slap of her wipers. “I don’t know what in me was always trying to save Sherry. Protect her. What did I know at age thirteen, fourteen—was it premonition? Was I beginning to see, subconsciously, as my own sexual awareness dawned, that my sister was tripping a sort of dangerous light fantastic? Dancing just a little too close to the sun that final summer before college, before what was supposed to be the rest of her life? Because in the end, by lying for her, I failed her. Even after her death I failed her, by not remembering. In many ways everything that happened that late August day, and after it, was my fault . . . It should have been me , not Sherry, who died.”
    Meg shifted her truck back into gear and pulled out into the empty road. Hands firm on the wheel, she fought the mounting urge to pull a U-turn, and just call it quits. Because if she was going to write Sherry’s story, she had to go back. She always visited the key locations when she wrote a book—she wanted to take her readers there, too. Wanted them to see, feel, what she’d seen. And, just as she was doing now, she verbally recorded her thoughts and impressions as she went, capturing her own knee-jerk reactions that she would later refine, interpret, and weave into the cold facts of the case.
    Just another job, another book. Do it all the same way, and you’ll be fine . . .
    “You could argue it every way to Sunday, but there was no escaping the fact that Sherry was the special daughter. The firstborn. The blessed one. She had everything. Tall, lithe. A golden girl to my shorter, dark-red looks. Honey tan to my pale complexion and freckles that made me look like a boiled lobster in the sun. An open smile and easy laugh that could ignite a crowd. She made people feel good. She’d just graduated—had a scholarship lined up for Stanford. Homecoming queen. Had been dating Tommy Kessinger since the eighth grade, a star quarterback. A gold, Greek god himself. A college football scholarship in hand, his sights set on the NFL. Shelter Bay’s young royalty and the world was their oyster . . .”
    Meg cleared her throat, negotiating a sharp bend down the twisting road. Steep now. Water running in a sheen down the hill. Her camper buffeted by gusts of wind.
    “Until Tyson Mack had growled into town on his custom chrome cruiser, with muscled biceps and rippling tats . . . oozing dark sex appeal, danger, thrill . . . until Sherry had mounted Ty’s bike and gone with him to the make-out spot on the dune spit near the state park boundary. And I’d covered for her while Tyson raped and strangled and left her dead in the dunes.” Meg tapped her brakes before another sharp turn.
    “After her death, I used to see the question in my mother’s eyes— why Sherry? I used to feel that question in town. I felt blame. And I wore it like a hair shirt, craving the discomfort as a form of self-flagellation. An attempt at redemption I’d never find.”
    Jonah’s words sifted into her mind . . .
    You need to go back, Meg, and forgive yourself for not having been able to save your sister. You need to see it was not your fault