The Deadly Sister Read Online Free Page A

throws a single one of her own. I’m not the one to get wrapped up in a murder and not call the police. To willfully start down a chain of wrong.
    I watched her go through the mundane activity of clicking on her turn signal, inching forward, and stopping as she waited for traffic to clear enough for us to merge. When we jerked to an especially hard stop and Cheyenne started yelling at a driver, a key on a necklace fell from beneath the collar of her shirt. Cheyenne noticed me staring at her and tucked the key away. “You know, if you’d told me that someone I knew was going to die,” she said, in that bizarre singsong she uses when she’s struggling to make conversation, “I’d have predicted Jeff Andrews.”
    It was a hugely weird thing to say, weird enough to make me cancel the question I was about to ask about the key. I didn’t reply for a few seconds. “Everyone loves Jefferson,” I said, in the manner of a television announcer.
    “He wasn’t a nice boy,” Cheyenne said, tapping her finger against the steering wheel.
    The neighborhoods around Xavier High are all planned developments in soil shades, the monotony broken only by electronics stores or billboarded restaurants where the silverware comes wrapped in waxy paper. But Medusa’s Den is deeper into the old town, near the abandoned rail depot in the center. Surrounded by drifters and gangs of kids avoiding home. Cheyenne locked the doors as we surfed for parking. We finally found a spot in a gravel lot that spilled between office buildings. We hid our purses and watches under the seats. I pulled my hair down and mussed it. I always feel plastic downtown.
    I’d been so intent on finding Maya that I hadn’t really considered what I’d say to her once I was face-to-face with her again. I’d have to see what condition she was in, find out what she knew about what had happened. I imagined her frantic and scared and angry, spouting nonsense. Maybe she’d have taken something to calm her nerves, would be docile and open, all pupils and liquid limbs.
    Cheyenne paid the meter, placed the receipt on her dashboard, and clicked the door lock button until the car honked twice. We headed toward Medusa’s Den, my dog leading the way.
    People only go to our downtown to work, so on the weekends it’s a hollowed-out place, like the set of an apocalypse movie minus the zombies. Locked revolving doors, vividly empty streets, homeless asleep on curling cardboard, gravel parking lots boundaried by rusty chains. In the corner of one of the more desolate lots was a large green vintage car. I stopped in my tracks.
    Cheyenne pulled up short alongside me. “What—oh, shit.”
    We stared at the car. Cody whined.
    “How’d he get his car here, if he’s dead in the woods?” Cheyenne asked.
    “Well, somebody obviously must have put it here.”
    “Who would ride off with Jeff’s car?”
    I couldn’t avoid stating the obvious implication. “Who do you think?”
    “Abby, this really doesn’t look good for her. Not at all.”
    “I know,” I snapped.
    “What do we do about the car?”
    “We stop standing here staring at it. Let’s go.”
    “I think we should investigate it,” Cheyenne said.
    “No.” I was shaking. Cheyenne took my hand and squeezed it.
    Medusa’s Den was right around the corner. It was a blacked-out window next to a liquor store where people placed orders from behind a Plexiglas wall. The grimy door hummed with neon. I pulled it open.
    The walls, floor, and much of the ceiling were plywood.In a case, body-piercing jewelry—much of it glowing green, yellow, orange—glinted like tropical fish next to some truly ugly fluorescent bongs. Two girls on a ripped couch by the entrance had just said something that ended with “Okay, Mama.”
    “How do I find Keith?” I asked them.
    They glanced at each other to see who should go first. I was irritated by the delay and, obscurely, by the very fact that these girls might have been friends of my