Summer of the Redeemers by Carolyn Haines Read Free Book Online

and crying now, a thin, tired wail that was beginning to worry me. She might starve or die of thirst or something even worse. Wehadn’t thought to bring diapers, and she was sorely in need of a change.
    “Let’s go get the Cokes.” I didn’t want to. Alice was looking for a rush of goose bumps. She’d wanted to go into the barn ever since I’d told her about the ghost business last summer, but I’d never go back in there no matter how much Arly teased me. Now I was going.
    The double doors creaked, and once again I wondered who would paint a barn white with pale blue trim. It was awful-looking. Barns were red with white trim. This just made the bigness and the oldness of the place seen even more peculiar.
    The plantation had never been rebuilt, and even the stone chimney had been picked clean by fortune hunters over the past thirty years. Sometime during the 1920s someone had built a small cottage beside the barn, and that was the house Sidney Miller and his doomed family had occupied. He’d shot his wife on the back steps and his two children in their beds. Folks said he just lost his mind for no reason. Or as Mama Betts said, no one ever found the reason. He’d been right popular, for a sheriff.
    The barn was dark. Slats of light fell through the bars of the stall windows, making narrow trapezoid patterns on the red earth floor. Alice pushed the door open wider, a hiccuping Maebelle V. making her shadow seem two-headed and sinister.
    “Just behind the old tire near the last stall,” Alice said. She wasn’t coming in with me. She was going to stand at the door, holding the baby and watching me. It was fair. If she had the baby, she wouldn’t be able to run fast enough, just in case we saw something we didn’t want to hang around and talk with.
    Off to either side there was the scurry of small creatures, rats more than likely, unused to the tread of a human foot in their barn. Above, the loft creaked, as if the great weight of hay was being shifted ever so slightly. As if some sleeping entity had been roused by the smell of three small girls below. Shift. The groan of old, tired boards. Or bones. At the end of the barn a clump of moldy hay fell. It had to be rats. They could climb as good as any cat when they took a notion.
    I was halfway down the long aisle of the barn when the bird swooped in front of me. Although I didn’t scream, I ducked and threw up my arms. Alice laughed, until the bird struck the window at the end of the barn. The thud was so loud, so powerful, that we knew the bird had broken its neck. We’d panicked it and now it was dead.
    Turning back, I looked at Alice. She wasn’t laughing any longer.
    “Get the Coke, and let’s go back to the tree,” she said, her voice eerie in the barn.
    Before my nerve completely disappeared, I turned toward to the last stall. Walking real slow, I pretended each stall had a beautiful horse in it. At the very end was the black, my own horse. It tossed its head and whickered a greeting. Ever since I’d been able to walk I’d wanted a horse. I even begged Mama to get pregnant again because I knew she’d have a foal for me. Mama Betts had told Effie not to indulge me in such foolishness, but for a long time Mama let me believe that it might happen. Until Daddy said that it was cruel to build up my hopes. He said I could have a horse, but Mama said no. She was afraid I’d be hurt. Horses were unpredictable, dangerous, big, capable of bizarre behavior. Mine wouldn’t be, but Effie had no faith in that.
    “Hurry up, Bekkah! Quit standing around daydreaming!”
    Of course the last stall was empty, except for two old tires, some rotting blankets, an old halter and the three Coca-Colas we’d hidden behind the tires. I got them all, hoping never to make another trip into the barn. At the door, Alice’s shadow extended almost to the middle of the barn. It was growing very late. Bikes or no bikes, we were going to be in trouble.
    We made sure to close the barn