The Real Mrs. Price Read Online Free PDF

In the meantime, the savings account was dwindling, and Lucy was barely managing to scrape by on her teaching salary, and she’d been giving some serious thought lately to selling this place. The memories of this house had been poisoned, anyway, so it was starting to seem like a good idea. She could sell it and start over again someplace else, but first things first. Ed needed to be dead, and Lucy needed to find that missing piece of the puzzle, a piece he could’ve very well left with that Texas woman.

 
    To Be Well
    M ARLOWE AND HER TWIN SISTER, Marjorie, had been raised by their aunt Shou Shou after their mother took off. Their mother would come home every now and then, but she’d never stay. Shou Shou claimed that her sister, Merrilyn, was haunted.
    â€œHow can a person be haunted?” Marjorie had asked once. “Houses are haunted. People ain’t haunted.”
    Shou Shou had just smiled. “People are made up of bodies that house a soul. Ain’t they? Of course we can be haunted. And Merrilyn always has been, by a restless spirit that won’t let her sit still.”
    Them Brown girls … it was never easy growing up as a Brown girl in Blink, Texas. It probably wouldn’t have been easy growing up anywhere. Shou Shou had told them that they were descendants of filles à la cassette, or casket girls, sent from France by nuns to marry French soldiers in Louisiana’s French colonies. According to her, the casket girls were guaranteed to be virgins by the Catholic Church. Whether that story was true or not was anybody’s guess. Shou Shou had a way of making things up that suited her fanciful notions of what she wanted to be true at any given moment.
    The kind of courage that it took to live in a small town and to be one of them Brown girls was enormous. And being Marlowe Brown was a particular challenge. Marlowe had been an outsider her whole life, ostracized and criticized for everything from how she dressed to her beliefs. Friends had been few and far between, and she’d always felt more like that stepcousin on your momma’s stepsister’s side that no one ever invited to anything. Blink citizens might’ve ignored her in the daylight, but they were her biggest fans after sundown, coming to her door for spells, potions, and readings. The best thing she could’ve ever done for them was to give them the gift of starting her own website. Now she could accept and fulfill their orders from the Web and have them delivered anonymously to their doors. Secretly, they loved her for it.
    *   *   *
    â€œThey painted this on my house the other night,” Marlowe said, leading her friend and contractor, Abby Rhodes, around to the side of the house.
    She and Abby had been friends since grade school, and despite the warnings from all the other kids on the playground, Abby dared to be friends with Marlowe and Marjorie, anyway. They weren’t as close as when they were kids, but Abby eagerly came to her aid when Marlowe put out the call.
    The words Killer-Niger-Witch were sprawled in large letters on the side of her house in red paint, along with a few upside-down crosses for good measure.
    Looking at that mess almost brought tears to Marlowe’s eyes, but she fought back the urge to cry. “The fact that they couldn’t spell kind of lessened the blow,” she said dismally.
    Abby shook her head. “I’m so sorry, Marlowe,” she said with remorse. “I swear, it feels like we’re going back in time instead of forward.”
    â€œCan you get it off?”
    Abby put her arm around Marlowe’s shoulder and hugged her. “I’ll have Ward come over here with some emulsifier. That should work. Worst comes to worst, we can paint it, but then we’d have to paint the whole house. It’s hard getting spray paint off brick.”
    Marlowe felt nauseous. “How much to paint the house?”
    Abby smiled.