Virginia Hamilton Read Online Free PDF

Better than to be citified, Justice would say. And her mom saying right back, Well, listen to her!—whatever that was supposed to mean.
    Now Justice heard the sound of water rushing. She smelled the river odor and believed it must be the smell of moss rotting, of edgewater drying up along the banks because of the lack of rain. Distasteful, stale, it flowed over her minutes before she came face to face with the Quinella Trace.
    Here, right on the water, everything burned with heat and brimmed over with moisture. The sun had taken up the river water on the air and spread it over the surrounding land. And here even the forever sky from California was a misty blue.
    “Breeder weather,” Justice whispered to the light of sky.
    Her dad often said that. Squinting into just such misty air, he told how such moisture and heat would eventually breed thunderheads of rainstorms.
    So far, he’s dead wrong, Justice thought. She couldn’t get it out of her head that it would never rain again.
    And wondered just a moment what her dad might be doing at this moment. Thinking about him easily, no pain. She never missed him the way she did her mom. Maybe because he had gone off to work for as long as she could remember. And by six-thirty in the morning.
    Justice squinted purposefully. White fluff clouds had grown a mite bigger, closer, but there was nothing about them to suggest thunder and rain.
    She strode on, sweeping her feet in a sideways motion to press the weeds down. In sunlight, she needn’t worry about what could lie hidden at the roots. She kept her eyes a pace ahead of the movement of her feet. And before she had expected it, she was standing on the bank of the Quinella Trace.
    “Well.” Weeds had not parted to show her that the river lay before her. They ceased to grow about a foot and a half from the edgewat?r.
    She was standing on the low bank that was a mud flat in proper weather. Now it was bone dry and a smooth slate gray. Bending, she dug at something white almost buried in the powdery earth. Got it out. It was a near-perfect skeleton of a tiny fish. Examining it a moment, but letting it loose as her eyes fixed on the black-water Trace.
    Means to follow lines. Trace, she thought, as, standing here, she had thought before.
    Or to disappear and—leave barely a clue!
    This last was a new discovery in her mind.
    If you did leave a clue, you’d leave a “trace.” That’s why it’s named Trace?
    She began to puzzle it out.
    The black water could have dried up, with just a trace left where the water once had been. So someone named it Trace.
    Centuries later, the black water had flowed again.
    Why didn’t they change the name to Filled Up, or something?
    Trace was what it used to be and still is. Maybe for a thousand years! But only seventy or a hundred years of being the Quinella Trace.
    “I don’t know,” Justice said softly.
    Her dad had told her that, long ago, boats had been raced on the river. And she’d thought Quinella was a person’s name until some boy said it was a betting game. But for sure she knew that the Quinella Trace was the blackest water anybody’d ever seen. Nobody, not one kid she knew, had any idea why.
    Wasn’t water supposed to be blue like the sky? They all thought so. There was the blue reflection of sky in it, but the water itself stayed fear-dark. Kids used to wade in it until a story got started around. The kind of darkness tale that someone like her friend Mrs. Jefferson, down their field, might think to tell. Mrs. Jefferson told lots of things that Justice had a way of forgetting. But she knew the story told about the Quinella was true.
    Levi sure proved it, too.
    The sound and the flowing sight of the black water made Justice shiver. Yet she was burning warm, standing so still by the edgewater. Whining sounds of insects were close around. Gnats were worrisome, trying to nest in the wet creases as she squinted her eyes. She mashed them with her fingers and rubbed them away. Her hands