Essential Maps for the Lost Read Online Free Page B

and hang out and joke; the way she’s there for Mads like no one else. But Mads also has certain permanent images that knock-knock-knock. The constant, cruel jabs at her father when he still lived with them. The rages that cause Mads to flee to her room. The inability to manage, which Mads must manage. “I know.”
    â€œAnd you don’t have to become her.” Aunt Claire seemed angry. She shoved her hands down into her robe pockets. She’s seen years of stuff she thinks is wrong, and she’s had it with her sister-in-law. Mads should live her own life, Claire has told her. Mads shouldn’t be the nurse or the mother or the best friend.
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œAll this time on the computer . . .”
    â€œI’m just curious,” Mads said.
    Aunt Claire tipped her head and scrunched her nose, an all-purpose face that covered a lot of territory. If you’re just curious , the face said, you shouldn’t be. But you’re not just curious .
    And it’s true. Mads is beyond curiosity. She is in need. Dire, downright need . She needs to understand just how sad a person has to be to do something like that. Not able to even eat scrambled eggs sad? Ex-husband in Amsterdam sad? Running off in the middle of an open house sad?
    Or worse. Returning to Apple Valley forever sad? A signature that decides your whole life sad? Murray & Murray Realtors, the business cards already printed up and waiting sad? Hearing Suzanne and Carl Bellarose fight in the driveway as baby Ivy looks on with worried eyes sad? Because she is clearly this sad, this sad and more, and she has been for what already feels like a long, long time.
    Every night since the body in the water (no, that, too, is a lie—more than that, every day and every night, many times a day), Mads has looked at the satellite image of the bridge. She zooms in, click, click, click. Anna Youngwolf Floyd would have had to walk up those stairs, right there. She would have stepped onto that narrow grating. There is the cement wall she would have put one leg over. What was she thinking, just before she lifted her second leg? On the satellite image, Mads sees the view she had. Worse, she sees the view she herself might have.
    The thing is, there were two bodies in the water that day, hers and Anna Youngwolf Floyd’s. What keeps Mads up at night, what keeps her on the computer trying to find out more, more, more, is the question, the big question, the only question much of the time: why. The why feels like something about to happen. The why is a mystery that might lead to a way out. Or else, to the last locked door.
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    Thomas’s truck leaves the community college in the dust and heads away like it has an automotive mission. Mads rolls down the windows, and the breeze ruffles the bits of her homework that stick out from Mastering Real Estate Principles , 7th Edition. The truck heads to a place Mads has been before. Once she had Anna’s name, the address was easy to find. Now she parks across the street from the house, in the spot where she usually studies it. She visualizes the layout, as always. Standard Seattle Craftsman bungalow: living room in front, kitchen in back, bedrooms upstairs. She’ll say . . . two bedrooms. Three. Bathrooms need updating, probably. One fireplace; creepy unfinished basement where the laundry room is, she’ll bet. She pictures Anna Youngwolf Floyd down there, tossing a load into the washing machine. At least, Mads pictures Anna as she was in the 1976 La Conner High School yearbook photo Mads found online. Anna had long, straight dark hair parted on the side, and she was wearing the usual dreamy-but-looking-toward-the-future 1 x 1 inch yearbook expression (as well as a white shirt with a collar big enough for liftoff). She was next to Steve Yepa, who had a grown-man moustache and was sporting a suit and tie, and Gene Yu, whose bouffy hair could have