The Third Lie's the Charm Read Online Free PDF Page A

constant stream of tears away. “How do you even walk around with all of these people staring at you? All of this…”
    I could have filled in about a million different feelings where Bradley trailed off. Anger, sadness, hurt, disgust, grief, depression. Loss.
    â€œIt gets lighter.” I answered with the truth and regretted the glib taste on my tongue. “I mean, it never goes away. The feelings. They never stop, but it gets…I don’t know…livable, I guess. Like when you break a leg, at first it’s excruciating and you think you’re going to die. But eventually after you’ve had time to heal, it kind of fades into this constant, dull ache.” A faint breeze whistled through the leaves of the trees and plants surrounding us and tickled the back of my neck like cold fingers. “You never walk the same again, but eventually you do walk.”
    I needed him to know that he could survive this, to understand that eventually he’d see a pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel, and it would open up.
    â€œHe didn’t even leave me a message. Thirty-two calls and no messages. If he was going to kill himself, wouldn’t he tell me why? I was his best friend. He wouldn’t…he couldn’t…he would have told me something. I know it.”
    I looked at my feet, not knowing how to tell him that Alistair had left me a message, that I might have his last words on a tinny recording on my cell phone. “I…wait…” I unearthed my phone from the bottom of my bag. “You need to listen to this.”
    I pressed Play and pretended not to notice the way Bradley looked like he’d been punched in the stomach when he heard Alistair’s voice.
    â€œI’m at the Heart of Brown and I know exactly what I have to do. I won’t let them hurt him.”
    Bradley was off and running toward the old buildings that lined the fringes of Pemberly Brown’s campus before I even had time to switch off my phone. Back in the old days, Pemberly Brown was two schools. Pemberly Academy was an all-girls school and the Brown School for Boys was all boys. When they merged in the ’50s, an architect redesigned and expanded Pemberly’s campus to work as a coed institution, and the old Brown buildings had sat unused ever since. There was one building called “the Heart of Brown” that the Brotherhood had used as their meeting place.
    I raced to keep up with Bradley’s long strides, but his legs were trained, his muscles taut after years of lacrosse practice, and were no match for me and my riding boots. By the time I got to the building, the front door was already ajar and Bradley had disappeared inside.
    I yanked up the collar of my uniform shirt to protect myself against the dust, and I followed him into the darkened hallways. At first it wasn’t bad because I had the light from the door to guide me, but when I saw that the trail of footsteps made a right at the first hallway, I knew it would be nothing but darkness from this point forward, dust covering any visible windows, classroom doors shut tight.
    I put one foot tentatively in front of the other, willing myself not to panic in the dark. My hand shook as I reached into the pocket of my uniform skirt for my phone. God bless the flashlight app. The light of the screen momentarily blinded me, and I felt something graze my ankle.
    â€œOh my God!” Something scurried off in the other direction, too fast for the glow of my phone. I wanted nothing more than to turn around and run back to the safety of the bright April morning.
    But then I heard Bradley’s voice echo through the halls. “Kate! You gotta come see this. I think I found something.”
    I followed the sound of his voice and the thin stream of light from my phone into a large, cavernous room down one of the winding hallways. When I finally made it to the door, I saw Bradley kneeling on the ground with his own phone