Blessed are the Dead by Kristi Belcamino Read Free Book Online Page B

pull off what looks like a whiskey bottle. The kids at the bus stop are gazing down at their feet. I try to act nonchalant and fiddle with my phone but am holding my breath. Finally, the car screeches away, and the sound of the pounding music grows faint.
    The other kids have gone silent. They watch as the two older boys stare me down.
    â€œNice tits,” one says. He can’t be older than twelve.
    â€œDidn’t your mama teach you not to talk to women that way?”
    â€œI ain’t got no mama, bitch.”
    There’s nothing to say to that. I lean against a low, wooden fence, watching the kids roughhouse and smoke cigarette butts they find on the ground. A few minutes later, the school bus arrives. I don’t leave until it pulls away.
    I HEAD BACK to the bar and park out front, careful not to get too close to the line of nearly a dozen motorcycles parked perpendicular to the sidewalk. Nobody is out front anymore. Inside, I struggle to see in the sudden darkness. The first things I notice are steps leading down. I freeze. I can’t move another inch. I don’t do underground. When I was six, I found my father’s body in our basement, three days after Caterina disappeared. I haven’t stepped foot underground since.
    A gurgle of fear courses through my stomach until my eyes adjust, and I realize that the dark, windowless bar is not in a basement. There are only two steps leading down.
    The damp musty smell of stale alcohol in the bar also sharply brings me back to the day I found my father’s body. He smelled just like it does in here. His neck was bent oddly, and there was an empty bottle nearby. When I told my mother this, she said I was seeing things—­that I had an overactive imagination. That’s the same thing she said whenever I told her my father was acting funny when she was at work, stumbling and talking strange.
    The doctor said his heart went out, she told me, and doctors don’t lie.
    The door of the bar closes loudly behind me, jolting me from my memories, and suddenly I’m hyper alert as the low murmur of conversation comes to a halt. The only sound is the squeak of a chair as someone turns toward me.
    Once my eyes adjust, I spot about ten men on barstools and another dozen or so seated at tables nursing drinks and watching the morning news. Several of them have leather biker jackets and grimy jeans with knit-­stocking hats, probably just off their midnight shifts down at the harbor. I draw myself up to my full height of just over five-­six and head to the bar. The click clack of my high-­heeled sandals seems obnoxiously loud in the silence. I stumble in the darkness and hear a snigger of laughter but pull back my shoulders and continue.
    â€œExcuse me,” I say, walking right into the middle of the group. “I’m with the Bay Herald, and I’m doing a story about a missing little girl. Did any of you see her on Monday, the day she disappeared?”
    Silence. The men only stare. I wait.
    â€œHow ’bout you come sit on my lap for a few minutes while I think about whether I saw her or not?” one man finally says, and they all burst into laughter.
    Then another deeper voice. “How about you get the fuck out of here and mind your own goddamn business.”
    Suddenly, the silence takes on a life of its own, crackling with expectation. His words make my gut wrench in fear, but I force myself to look his way.
    The man looks like his huge frame is going to snap the barstool in two. He has a scuffed leather jacket with biker gang patches covering it, and a long moustache curls up at the ends above his sneer. He is not facing me but continues watching me through the mirror at the bar.
    â€œWhat the hell makes you think you can walk in here and start asking us questions?” he asks. The air is tense. I’m not the only one holding my breath.
    I take a big gulp of air, and, as every eye in the place watches, I walk right