The Hawley Book of the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

tale of the Fetch, the stealer of souls. I tried to act like myself in the strange weeks that followed, made the girls go through the motions of regular meals and bedtimes, never let them see me when I wept. But every night I would go to a secret drawer in our bedroom that I’d forbidden Marisol to touch, take up the shirt Jeremy had put in the laundry basket to be washed the night before I shot him. I’d wrap myself in it, press the collar to my face, and breathe his scent in, pretend he was in bed next to me. Wake in the morning and weep silently into the shirtthat was empty of my husband, my love. Whose soul had been stolen from me, from himself. And would
we
ever be entirely safe again? Like the woman in Nan’s story, I just didn’t know.
5
    I closed the show. Without Jeremy, there
was
no show. I’d lost my husband and my job in the same instant. I missed Jeremy almost every waking moment, but I missed our show, too. Every evening I missed it like a lost limb. I tried to take stock of my skills, but they weren’t much, without magic. I had enough money to float us all for a while, if I was careful, a little breathing space before I had to find work of some kind. Which was convenient, for I didn’t feel safe out in the open. I felt eyes on me at the grocery store, at the barn, in crowds, and in nearly empty parking lots with the hot sun beating down on me. I cut my trips outside the house down to the absolutely necessary.
    Maybe the girls sensed my terror. Not one of them wanted to return to school. Nathan fell into his old role, staying with us and tutoring them as he had during the happy times we were on the road performing. He was far better at it than I was, and I knew it. I cooked with Marisol, and she put up with my poor attempts at cleaning. Nathan kept the girls busy. None of us wanted to leave the house. We wanted only to be together in some listless configuration of a not-quite family.
    Nathan set out jigsaw puzzles on an end of the dining room table, and they became a thread to lead us through the days. Van Gogh’s
Sunflowers
, a Landseer Newfoundland.
The Lady of Shalott
.
    One day, I stopped in my wanderings to fill in part of John Waterhouse’s
Lady
. It had been a month and a day since Jeremy’s murder. The strange weather of summer had given way to a dazzling September. There were still no leads on the man I’d come to think of as our Fetch. It was as if he’d never really existed. If it weren’t for the gun and Wesley, he might not have been real; he might have been just an ancient story.
    Caleigh was at the table, plying her string. Fai was reading to her from
The Wind in the Willows
. Until Jeremy died, Caleigh’s favorite books had been about families.
The Five Little Peppers
, the Little House books. Now they gathered dust, and she asked for books with only animal characters. No mothers or fathers. The names of her string patterns had changed, too. Now she made “Sleep in the Afternoon” or “Float in the Pool.” The one she made most often was called “Missing Dad.” It had a big gap in the middle.
    I picked up a puzzle piece, a bit of the Lady’s flowing red hair, the color of my own.
    “She left the web, she left the loom, she made three paces through the room. She saw the water lilies bloom … the Lady of Shalott
. Tennyson,” Grace piped up behind me. Maybe Nathan was managing to get something besides grief to stick in their heads.
    Fai looked up from her book. “Mom, do you think it’s time for us to leave the web?”
    “But when the Lady left the web, the mirror cracked from side to side and she was cursed.” Caleigh frowned at the string tangled in her fingers. “She died in her stupid boat. Although I’m not sure why.”
    “She couldn’t ever be part of the world. She could only see it in her mirror,” Fai told her, then sighed as if she were the one reflected in the mirror.
    That snagged my heart. I didn’t want my girls to be like the Lady of Shalott.