Pretty Little Dead Girls Read Online Free PDF Page A

his cart, and a few cans of soup. Tonight was to be a rare lone night for him, one where perhaps he could spend the time peering deep into his soul and ponder the future of his life and whether it was heading where he wanted it to go. Wouldn’t that be a fine thing!
    Alas, it is not how Chad will choose to spend his evening.
    He will eat his frozen meal that he will only cook partially because his microwave is on the fritz, and he will watch an old movie with some rather crude and derogatory humor that will leave him strangely hollow inside. He will take a shower and dry himself off with a garishly patterned towel that he will then throw on the floor. He will crawl into his bed and he will curl up on his side and fall asleep alone. He will have a rather odd dream about mechanical porpoises and white trains speeding through tunnels with robots cavorting about on top. He will wake and think about the pretty, ethereal girl at the market, and again puzzle about why she rejected him, but shrug his shoulders and decide that a soon-to-be-dead girl sounds like trouble, anyway.
    Let us hurry ahead to the morning.
    Chad checked out, and loaded his groceries into the trunk of his car, keeping a Mountain Dew to drink immediately. He chugged it in under four seconds (almost breaking his own soda-chugging record; way to go Chad!) and then tossed the empty can into the dumpster behind the Safeway. It didn’t land with a thunk or a clink or any of the delightful onomatopoeic sounds that an aluminum can makes when it hits the metallic floor of an empty dumpster. Therefore the dumpster was at least somewhat full.
    “Why on earth would we care?” you ask in exasperated confusion. “Does it matter to me if the garbage men haven’t emptied the dumpster beside a Seattle Safeway? And what does this have to do with Chad the Fish Guy? Why am I following him only to find out that he’s throwing cans in dumpsters? Why, that’s hardly sinister at all!”
    Ah, truly brilliant reader. You are so accurate, and yet so misled at the same time.
    The drinking of the soda is not nefarious, nor is the tossing of it into the dumpster. Rather, this is a good thing to learn about our Chad, for now we know that he chooses not to litter, and if life is about keeping score, then this is a point in his favor.
    But the fact that the dumpster is not empty, well, that turns out to be a very poor thing indeed, at least, for somebody.
    No, more than that.
    It turns out to be disconsolation for several somebodies.

CHAPTER TEN
    Of Murder and Flowers
    The very day that: 1) Chad threw a stuffed fish at her, and 2) Eddie ran away, Bryony landed a delightful little job assembling bouquets of flowers at the market.
    “Excuse me,” said a small round-faced girl with beautiful, dark almond eyes, “you seem very nice, and you also seem lost. May I help you somehow?”
    Bryony was quite taken with this child. “Why, yes. I am looking for a job. Do you know anybody who is hiring?”
    Suddenly every shop and station and table had a desperate need for more employees, sometimes kicking present employees out in order to make more space. Who didn’t want a tragically sorrowful girl who chose to wear a happy smile around? Human nature dictates that we want what we want, and we want what is scarce. We want to enjoy things before they are taken from us. And this girl was defying fate by standing there this very minute. She should be dead by now, she was already lost. They grasped onto her life like a string of pearls.
    The little round-faced girl worked at a flower stand, and they needed more help (really, truly, they actually did), and Bryony was named for a flower, and saw very few in the desert, so she was delighted to accept the position. The vendors around rehired their old employees (“Come on back, Joe, I was only kidding,”) and things fell into a pleasant routine at the market.
    Until the woman in the stall next to Bryony’s was found one rainy afternoon, stuffed into