The Loveliest Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

tell her things she did not want to know.  
    She had been born and raised in the small northern California town of Cottonwood, seventy-five miles south of Mt. Shasta. She had a brother, Charles, five years her senior, whom she heard from every year at Christmas and on her birthday. Her father, dead for a dozen years now, had been a plumber, her mother a kindergarten teacher. None of them had understood her—Lily had scarcely understood herself early in life—but her mother was the only one who’d tried. As a child, Lily preferred solitude—being around people only filled her mind with confusing, sometimes frightening, images and thoughts. As a result, school had been a daily nightmare for her from the beginning. She had no trouble with her studies—she was an exceptionally bright, intelligent student—but she had difficulty concentrating on them when she was being mentally bombarded from all directions. Socially, she was an outcast by choice. She preferred to be alone with a book and a snack. Reading had been her favorite activity and food her only friend. Her weight had gone up early on and had never come down again.  
    Lily’s mother had died of breast cancer when Lily was eleven years old, leaving her a stranger in the house with her father and Charles. She had become even more withdrawn then. Outside of school, which she cut whenever the opportunity arose, the only place she had gone with any regularity was the small Cottonwood Library, where, at the age of twelve, she’d met the best friend she’d ever had.  
    The new head librarian, Annabelle Youngblood, was a tall, graceful, fifty-three-year-old widow with streaks of silver in her short black hair and a pair of jeweled reading glasses she wore on a chain around her neck. When Lily walked into the library on Mrs. Young-blood’s first day, the woman immediately turned to her and watched her closely wherever she went. After a few minutes of the librarian carefully watching her every move, Lily began to feel very self-conscious—more so than usual, because she always felt self-conscious—so she went to the back of the library where the woman could not see her. On that day, as on every day for eight months, she’d looked for books on psychic phenomena.  
    By then, Lily had begun to understand that not only was she different from others, she had some strange ability that allowed her to know things she could not possibly know. She had been confused by the thoughts and images that plagued her until she saw her mother’s funeral the year before—she’d seen it weeks before her mother had been diagnosed with cancer. By the time it had been found, the cancer had spread and become inoperable, and Lily’s mother had died only months after being diagnosed. When the funeral took place, it was exactly as Lily had seen it in her mind, with her mother lying in an open casket at the front of the funeral chapel. Lily had never been in the funeral chapel before, but she had seen it in vivid detail in her mind months before. She even had heard the organ playing the exact same music it had played at the funeral. That was when she began to suspect that maybe she wasn’t crazy as she’d always suspected. She had worked her way through most of the library’s books on psychic phenomena, with only four left that she had not yet read.  
    That day in the library, as she looked through one of the books, a hand came to rest on Lily’s shoulder from behind, and she almost jumped out of her skin. She dropped the book she was holding and spun around to find the librarian standing behind her, smiling.  
    “Hello, Lily,” she said. “I’m Mrs. Youngblood. I think you and I have something in common.”
    “We ... do? How did you know my name?”
    “You know, I might be able to help you even more than those books.”
    Mrs. Youngblood invited Lily over to her house that evening to make cookies. Lily did not have to ask permission from her father. Since she spent all her time in