The Graduation by Christopher Pike Read Free Book Online Page A

remembered when he was a boy going with his mother to a bank where there had previously been a holdup and a fatal shooting. He told his mother it was a “bad place” before she had told him what had happened there. The McCoy house now felt like a “bad place.”
    He paused for a moment at the foot of the stairs, looking toward the kitchen. Standing in this spot, Nick had seen Bill with his head bent over the sink. Bill never explained why he had been standing there upset, before the gun went off.
    Michael decided to retrace Nick’s steps to the room where Alice had died. He climbed the double flight of stairs and paused at the first door on the left. It had been locked the night of the party, the room beyond silent, and it was the same now. The next door on the left led to the bathroom. The Rock had been there, showering and flushing out his chlorined eyes.
    Michael opened the sole door on the right and peeped out onto the second-story porch, where Kats had been getting a breath of fresh air and admiring the stars. It seemed to clear Michael’s mind, going through this ritual. This hallway had one more door on the left. Nick had paused there, too, and listened at the door and heard snoring. Russ said he had been asleep inside. Then again, Russ couldn’t remember where he had been when the varsity tree had toppled to the ground, or whether it had been Polly or Sara who had taken his ax away the first week of school.
    The hallway turned to the right. There were two doors on the left. The first swung open easily, revealing a spacious bedroom with an adjoining bathroom. But it had been locked when Nick tried it. and there had been moans coming from inside. Bubba said he didn’t know anything about it. No one seemed to know anything.
    Michael came to the last room. The door was closed over, and as he opened it, the hinges creaked loudly, doing wonders for his nerves. The room was bare except for an aluminum ladder set beside the closet. He remembered the ladder from his last inspection the day of the funeral.
    The starkness of the wooden floor struck him, as it had before. Every room in the house had carpeting except this one. He found the fact disturbing, although he wasn’t sure why. He stepped inside.
    The blinds on the windows—those facing east and south—were down. He raised them, letting in more light. The bullet hole in the wall beneath the east windows had not been plastered over. As he knelt beside it, his conviction that she had not broken her nose falling strengthened. It was less than three feet above the floor and straight as an arrow into plaster.
    Yet all this was old news. He searched the room and the adjoining bathroom, and discovered nothing significant. The screens on the windows were all screwed down. There were no trapdoors, as Jessica had once pointed out. There was only one entrance into the room, one exit.
    If she was dead before she was shot, was she dead long?
    He found himself standing at the east windows, which faced the McCoy garden—as opposed to the south windows, which overlooked the pool—pondering what the coroner had said about the strength of her assailant. Clark had been thin as a rail. In a fight, Michael figured he could have taken him easily.
    Then he looked up and noticed the broken shingle at the overhang of the eaves outside the east window. It appeared to Michael as it had before, as if someone had been on the roof and stepped too close to the edge and broke off a couple of inches of the dark brown wood with the heel of his shoe. When he thought about how steep the east slant of the roof appeared from the front, however, he began to doubt that the damage could have been caused by a misplaced foot. Only the original roofers, with the help of safety lines, would have been able to stand that close to the edge. Why wouldn’t they have repaired the damage? It was the only shingle on the entire side of the house that was broken.
    Michael wanted to have a closer look at it. But he