Lost Voices Read Online Free PDF

bottom of his glass.
    Daylight floated in through the dusty windows, but most of the bar was already just as dark as it would be late at night.
    “Not mine. She’s not mine. Just the pain in the ass my no- good brother left me. Leave it to Andrew to keep causing problems even after he’s dead.” The bartender didn’t laugh at this the way he was supposed to; his mouth pinched and he shot i 25
    her uncle Peter a critical look. “She’s not mine, that is,” her uncle snarled defensively. “But she should have been.” Luce hunched down as far as she could, hearing that. The tightness came back in her stomach, because things always went badly when her uncle started talking this way. He’d definitely beat her once they were alone.
    “How should it be,” the bartender asked, “that the girl should belong to anybody? Excepting to the ones who made her?” He had his back to Luce now, fetching out the whiskey to pour her uncle a new shot. He thought of something. “Where’s her mother?”
    “You remember Alyssa Gray?” her uncle asked. The bartender looked at him sharply.
    “Who doesn’t remember her? Sweet, bright, funny girl like that. Could make anybody laugh like crazy. And so beautiful, too.” The bartender glanced at Luce again, but she kept her head down over her book, even though she couldn’t read it very well in the dimness. It was something about the bronze hair and oddly violet eyes of the heroine. The dead girl’s eyelids had had a pearly iridescence to them, Luce remembered, almost a shimmer. “You don’t mean that’s Alyssa’s daughter?”
    “And Alyssa, you seem not to recall, was my girl. Talking about marrying me, even, before Andrew dragged her off from here. He just fooled her with all his crazy talk. And he made her a sidekick to his messed- up life of rip- offs and split towns. It was like some kind of obstacle course for them, what with all the places they couldn’t go back to.” The bartender didn’t seem particularly interested in what Peter was telling him now, though. Luce didn’t let herself look, but she knew he was still gazing her way.
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    “I guess that girl does look a lot like her mother. Almost as pretty. You just don’t see it too easy because the personality’s so different. Alyssa would have had everybody cracking up by now.” Luce wished they would talk about something else. There was no chance her uncle would stop looking over at her as long as he kept thinking about her mother. “Andrew he was one of the guys lost with the High and Mighty, wasn’t he?”
    “Andrew’s whole damn life was a shipwreck. The High and Mighty was just the finishing touch for him.” Her uncle’s voice sounded different now: smeary and vicious, yes, but also choked.
    “Everybody who got near him went down with his own personal disaster. Killed Alyssa, just by not getting her to the hospital in time. And now you can see what’s left of him.” Luce knew, without looking, that her uncle was nodding in her direction. “Flotsam spinning around on the waves.”
    “And you don’t think, if Alyssa was alive,” the bartender challenged, “she’d appreciate you speaking more kindly of her child?” Peter didn’t answer that. He’d turned to gaze off at a spot on the floor, and Luce thought he might be about to start sobbing. The silence felt thick and somehow sticky. After ten minutes of quiet she tried to slip out of her chair, but her uncle’s gaze pivoted to fix on her at once.
    The afternoon wouldn’t end, and Luce couldn’t leave. Every time she tried moving even slightly her uncle swung his bleary face and glowered at her. He kept drinking, and every time he looked her way his face seemed bigger and messier, less like a human face and more like a pile of wet garbage, or a plastic bag wobbling around on the sea. She let her head drop on the table and closed her eyes.
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    * * *
    She was lying propped on her elbows on a cheap motel bed. They’d stopped