Ink and Bone by Lisa Unger Read Free Book Online Page A

that came up was the call of the rose-breasted grosbeak, a North American bird—white, black, and red—with a melodious call of up to twenty notes similar but far more beautiful (according to some birdwatching blogger) than the call of a robin. When Finley listened to the call, it didn’t sound anything like what she’d heard. She bookmarked the page anyway. The bird lived up north in the summer and migrated along the east coast to South America in the winter. It might be something, a piece that would fit into a larger whole. It was too soon to tell.
    Next, she typed in: “things that squeak.” An article from Better Homes and Gardens topped the list with a bunch of potentially squeaky things—the door, the floor, drawers, a bed frame, a mattress, a faucet. The faucet gave Finley pause, the image of the running water. She closed her eyes and saw a rusty stream of water pouring onto the ground. But was it connected to the sound?
    Squeaking engine, definition of squeak (a short, high noise), bicycle noises, a common problem with the rear wheel of an Audi; the coins on the bus go clink, clink, clink —a children’s rhyme; the sound one blogger said the rusty wheel on his old wagon made. Finley chased links and read chats and articles and blog posts until hours had passed and her back started to ache from hunching over her laptop.
    Finally, she closed the lid on her computer, her brain fried. How did it get to be ten thirty? She noticed then, with a giddy sense of relief, that the squeaking was gone. She got up from the bed and stretched high, hearing her neck crack. Then she walked down the hall.
    In the bathroom, she looked at herself in the mirror, ran fingers damp from the faucet through her spiky pink and black hair. She put the glasses she wore for reading on the white porcelain of the old sink, lined her eyes with black pencil, put on some lipstick.
    Back in her room, she changed from her cotton bra to a lacier affair, something her mother sent with a designer label and a big price tag. (Amanda was the queen of mixed messages. Really—what kind of mother buys her single young daughter lingerie after a lifetime of hammering into her the consequences of casual sex?)
    Finley pulled on a tight black tee-shirt—cotton, not too sexy. Sexy enough. Still in jeans and boots, her jacket over her shoulder, helmet under her arm, she walked quietly down the hall. The television was on in her grandmother’s room, but Finley didn’t knock. She didn’t want the look , the not-saying. Downstairs, the little boy was playing with trains in the living room. Faith—in her old-timey black dress, with her salt-and-pepper hair pulled tight into a bun and her perpetual disapproving frown—stood predictably by the door, that look of warning on her face.
    “Go away,” Finley told her.
    And Faith obeyed, but only to turn and clomp up and down the hallway, calling attention to herself. Finley really couldn’t stand her. Even though the woman had suffered and was ostensibly (according to Eloise) well meaning, she really got under Finley’s skin—for all sorts of reasons.
    But then Finley was gone, straddling the bike, the engine beautifully loud in her head, traveling fast, too fast, up the long rural road into town.
    *  *  *
    Finley couldn’t remember how old she was when she first started seeing The Three Sisters. Young—maybe even as young as five. Or maybe they had always been there. However old she’d been, Finley already understood that there were people around her that were not visible to others. And she already knew better than to say anything about them, because it scared her mother.
    There was a certain frozen look Amanda would get on her face when Finley asked about the old woman at the table or the girl sleeping under her bed. There was a blanching of the skin, a dropping of the jaw, kind of like the look her mother got when their cat Azriel brought dead mice or birds into the kitchen and deposited them on the