The Riverman (The Riverman Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF

pushing me and snapping at me. If you’re playing some weird sort of game, I don’t want to be involved.”
    “Not long ago, even twenty years ago, they’d put kids in asylums. If a kid was talking about things that adults didn’t understand, they’d lock that kid away.”
    “I don’t know if you realize how much you’re freaking me out,” I said. “Please leave.”
    She shook her head and asked, “Why’d you decide to dig? Did you know the ammo can was down there? Did you know about the map?”
    “The map?”
    She held up the handkerchief.
    “If I explain, will you leave?” I asked.
    She took a moment to think about it. She shrugged.
    Honestly, any curiosity I had about that handkerchief was overpowered by my desire for life to return to how it was before Fiona showed up at my door, to when she was nobody but an odd girl who lived down the street, a former friend and nothing else. Someone to forget. “Keri saw you bury it,” I explained. “Like a stupid idiot, I went and dug it up last night.”
    “Does anyone else know?”
    “Keri told her friend Mandy, but they don’t know what you buried.”
    “Do you trust them?”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Exactly what it always means.” Fiona pulled a plastic lighter out of her pocket, sparked it up, and dipped the corner of the handkerchief into the flame. Nothing at first, then fire scrambled.
    “What the…?”
    Placing the burning handkerchief on a stone, Fiona said, “You were only supposed to find that as a last resort. If I was already gone. Now I’ll have to teach you. About everything. I thought writing things down, recording things, would be a good way to keep track of all the details, so that people someday know the truth. But if that stuff falls into the wrong hands, there’s no telling what might happen to the others. It’s better if you memorize it all.”
    “I’m not memorizing anything,” I said. “You are nuts. They should lock you up.”
    Disappointment whittled ridges in her brow. “The only thing I’m asking you to do is listen.”
    “And you said that if I had my doubts, then it wasn’t going to work.”
    “It’s too late now. You know about the Riverman. You need to be convinced.”
    “Convinced of what?”
    Fiona crouched down to get a closer look at the burning handkerchief. She kept her eyes on the flames as she said, “There’s a boiler in our basement, in a room where my dad keeps tools and boxes of holiday decorations. The boiler feeds water to all the radiators in the house. That night, when I was four years old, the night I heard the radiators talking? Well, the radiators told me to go to the boiler. As I said, they were clicking. But I understood the clicking. They had a voice, and I did as they asked. I went to that room and I climbed up on a box and pulled the hanging string to turn on the hanging lightbulb, and I climbed down and stood next to the boiler, and the clicking told me to wait for one moment longer, and I asked out loud, ‘Wait for what?’ And that’s when it happened, when it opened up.”
    The handkerchief was shriveled and black now, infested with little red embers. Fiona didn’t look at me, and I certainly couldn’t look at her. Because I had abandoned something once in the thicket of images and sounds and smells that made up my early memories, and Fiona’s story was now returning that uncomfortable moment to me. Simply put, what had happened to her had happened to me, and I knew what she was going to say next. And that terrified me.
    “Without a noise,” Fiona continued, “without a flash of light or anything like that, the outside of the boiler disappeared. Vanished. A cylinder of water hung in the air where the boiler was. A perfect, unbroken cylinder. It was gorgeous, and I reached forward to touch it. As soon as the tips of my fingers reached the water, I was pulled in. For the first time, I went to Aquavania.”
    Wind grabbed the remains of the handkerchief, tore it