The Keeper by Sarah Langan Read Free Book Online Page B

girl wearing black Mary Janes took a baby step toward her. She’d been thinking about Susan a lot lately. Every time her mind wandered or she closed her eyes at night, there was her daughter frozen forever as a six-year-old girl. A cheerful little girl with her whole life ahead of her. A life not yet formed or gone wrong. Mary blinked to dispel the image. Silly to think about the past. Like those people who worried about what lay inside the Titanic. They swam deep under water looking for jewels and instead they found corpses.
    Mary was a tall, handsome woman with clean features and sharply tweezed brows. Her hair was still brown save for the shock of white that framed the side of her face and gave her the appearance of perpetual surprise. Now she looked around the house. Cookie crumbs were scattered across the table. The ladies had tracked mud through the kitchen. Little high-heeled footprints circled the room like dance-step stickers at an Arthur Murray dance studio. She filled a bucket with warm water and Top Job cleanser and began cleaning.
    Today had been a pretty good day. It had been her turn to hostess the monthly bridge game she played with the girls, and she’d won every hand. It was easy. Over the years they’d been meeting, only Mary had had taught herself the nuances of bidding. She stayed up late at night with borrowed bridge manuals from the Corpus Christi Library. On yellow legal pads she wrote complicated notes like: “Clubs against diamonds means no hearts.”
    Out the window she saw that the rain had turned from a drizzle to a downpour. Work would be slow tonight. People didn’t leave their houses in this weather. For a quick second she thought about Susan. If she went for one of her walks tonight without her coat, she’d be chilled to the bone. A skinny thing, just like her father. A mean thing, just like her father.
    Mary blinked, and banished the image from her mind. Usually, she didn’t think about her daughter. It was best that way. It was best, in fact, to pretend she’d never been born.
    Bridge. Right, bridge.
    Today, she and the girls had gossiped about former classmates, divorces, and people who’d given up on being middle-aged and moved to Florida. The girls were old friends from Corpus Christi High School. All except Mary still lived there. They were housewives now, drinking mixed pink drinks with names like Loosey Lucy at the local golf club and complaining about their husbands who worked too hard. When it was their turn to hostess, Mary liked to go to their houses and touch the little ceramic figurines they all seemed to have, or smell the rose potpourri in their bathrooms. She did this when no one was looking, and it felt like stealing.
    For a long time she had thought that she would move back to Corpus Christi, where the owners of things lived, but somehow that never happened. Ted didn’t get the right promotions, and her father never forgave her for running off and getting married. If she hadn’t eloped with Ted, her high school graduation present would have been a trip to Europe. She still thought about the places she would have gone: Madrid, Barcelona, Zurich, Florence, Rome.
    There were a few leftovers in Bedford who still had money—the Martins and Fullbrights. Surprisingly, her girls had located both. But those families were different. Their presence was a reminder of poverty rather than a respite from it. The Martins had inherited their money from Cathy’s great-grandfather William Prentice. The Fullbrights came by theirs by more honest means: Adam was a surgeon. Both lived in big, modern houses with central air conditioning and spanking new furnaces. They dropped money all over town, and told people they’d never leave; this place held their roots. Mary found this logic hard to swallow. Like being a millionaire who lives in the worst part of the Bronx, not because you want to show things off, just because you like being shot at.
    Mary sighed. After Ted died, she had