The Ghost of Ben Hargrove by Heather Brewer Read Free Book Online Page B

gone. Off to take her mother home, on the Sabbath, like any good girl would.

Chapter 2
    After a full day of residing in Spencer, and a full three hours of lying awake in bed, I was beginning to worry that I might never sleep again. I was sure I wasn’t the only restless person in our new house. I could hear my dad pacing down the hall, the sound only briefly accented by the ruffling of a newspaper. He was looking through the classifieds, if I had to put money on it.
    Maybe my restlessness had something to do with the fact that my bedroom was stuffed so full of boxes that it felt more like some kid’s cardboard fort than a place to sleep. Or maybe it was because every time I closed my eyes, I saw Cara’s nails scraping lightly against her thigh—shortly accompanied by Martha’s words: “YOU’RE GONNA BURN!”
    Whatever the reason, I was getting pretty sick of this bout of insomnia, and as far as I could tell, it had only just begun. Lucky me.
    I wasn’t sure why I kept thinking about Cara, anyway. She probably had a boyfriend. Girls like her always did. She was smokin’ hot and a little bit badass. Her boyfriend was probably a biker or a thug or the leader of some gang. I wasn’t anything so cool. My friends in Denver had all been nerds of one kind or another, but I couldn’t really be defined by them. I wasn’t a gamer, because I didn’t own every system on the planet and beat every game the day it was released. I wasn’t a book nerd, because I didn’t enjoy the classics and had never met an author in person before. I wasn’t a history geek, because the parts of history I enjoyed were the kinds of stories that qualified as useless trivia. I wasn’t really anything at all.
    And if I wasn’t anything, how was I supposed to attract the attention of a girl who was probably looking for everything in a guy?
    It didn’t matter. That’s what I told myself as I tossed and turned and tried not to think about the mysterious girl that occupied my thoughts. It didn’t matter what she wanted or didn’t want. I didn’t even know her. For all I knew, she could be a real psycho. After all, didn’t psycho run in the family?
    I closed my eyes, drinking in the faint singsong of the crickets outside, blocking out any thoughts of Cara and her crazy mother, until finally, I slipped into the empty quiet of sleep.
    Moments later, or maybe it was hours—with my alarm clock still lost in Fort Cardboard, I had no way of telling how long I’d dozed—I sat up, awakened by a noise. I listened closely, but there was nothing, just that eerie silence that comes with night in a small town. And then it hit me. It wasn’t a sound that had woken me, but the lack of one. The crickets outside my window had gone abruptly quiet.
    Stretching, I sat up and peered outside. Stars speckled the sky above, and my heart sank at the sight of them. In Denver, we couldn’t see the stars in town because of the city lights. In Denver . . . well, a lot of things had been different.
    I was about to lie back down when I noticed a strange silhouette standing on the sidewalk directly in front of the house. Whoever it was, they weren’t moving at all, just standing there. I watched, curious, waiting for them to turn and walk away, but they didn’t. And right as I became convinced that maybe it wasn’t a person at all, but a tree or a mailbox that I’d forgotten about, the figure raised its arm and pointed directly at my window. It was definitely a guy.
    My heart picked up its pace and I went straight into attack mode. What the hell was that guy thinking? I threw on my jeans, T-shirt, and shoes, and moved through the house, quickly but quietly. All I wanted to do was scare the guy a little. Just a little warning to keep him from stalking around my place in the dark.
    Not my place, I reminded myself. My grandmother’s place. My temporary