Long Black Veil Read Online Free Page B

looked at her. “You look familiar.”
    Devon turned halfway around in the chair. “I’m Devon Mackson. We go to the same high school. We were in the same Civics class sophomore year.”
    She waited for his reaction to her last name. Everyone in town knew the name and the scandal associated with her mother and father. Even Gammy’s fearsome reputation as an upstanding Christian woman—and folk healer—couldn’t stand against the town’s opinion of Devon’s mother. Her stint in prison only proved how trashy she was in their eyes. And so was Devon—guilt by association, by birth.
    She thought she saw a flicker in the back of his eyes, but she couldn’t be sure. He ran a hand through his dark brown hair. “Oh yeah. I remember now.”
    Devon highly doubted it. She turned back to face the monitor, uncomfortable with his eyes on her. In the class they had shared, she’d sat behind him in the second row to the left. She had spent a lot of time staring at his arms as they rested at the edges of his desk. He had very nice arms. But she knew he would never have noticed her, even if she had painted herself chartreuse and stood on her head on top of his desk.
    “You had all the answers,” he continued while she swanned about in memories of sophomore year. “You always blew the curve for the rest of us.”
    “Sorry.” She began typing search criteria into the screen. She made a what the hell face where he couldn’t see. Why should she be sorry? She was smart and she studied. If other students didn’t do as well as she did, it wasn’t her fault. She felt like she was trying to hide something.
    “Anyway, let me know if you need something down in the archives; just shout.” He tromped off back down the stairs.
    Devon jotted down her first set of results, then entered in more dates. She knew her mother and father’s birth dates, and she knew her father’s date of death. She’d need records for her grandparents, at least one set anyway. She’d already picked Gammy’s brain for family names and dates and had only come up with the vaguest of ranges. She knew her grandmother had boxes of old family papers; she planned on going through those after she’d gotten as far as she could here.
    She grabbed her notebook and hopped down from the chair, heading to the rows of filing cabinets that lined the walls. Devon started pulling files, leaving a marker in the spot so she knew where to return each folder. Birth records were the simplest to pull so she started photocopying those she could find. It was boring, monotonous work, but Devon slogged through, knowing it would be worth it if she got the money.
    Returning the first round of files, Devon started on her second pass. These were questionable relatives—they may or may not be part of her immediate family—but she wanted to have their information just in case. She believed in being thorough. She took the next set of papers over to the copier, keeping track of her copies in her small notepad where she kept everything about her college apps. She put in the first certificate and hit the Start button. The copier started up with a clonk and began to run the job with the noise of a commuter jet taking off.
    “Hey,” came a voice from behind her.
    She yelped, jumping straight up in surprise. Devon hadn’t heard anyone coming up behind her. Then again, the French Foreign Legion in full regalia could have been behind her and she wouldn’t have heard them over the whine and wheezes of the copier.
    She whirled around, coming face to face with Brock. “Take it easy,” he said, holding his hands up in what she assumed was supposed to be a comforting gesture. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you like that.”
    Despite her heart lolloping through her chest like a psychotic thoroughbred, Devon managed a smile. “You startled me. The copier’s so loud, I didn’t hear you.”
    Brock picked up the notepad that had fallen when he’d scared her. He returned it to her. “My shift