The Silent Girls by Eric Rickstad Read Free Book Online Page B

If I were, I’d be a witch. See what I mean?”
    He did, and he didn’t.
    She laughed. “Girls are strange.”
    “You think?”
    “Especially when it involves other, prettier girls. What’s this about?”
    “She’s missing.”
    “She’ll turn up,” Gale said.
    “You seem pretty sure.” Rath studied her face, surprised by her quick response.
    “When I was her age”—a lost look came over her face—“I disappeared a lot.”
    “So. What’s she like?”
    “Like I said. Freakin’ private. She comes in, says hey, flashes her smile, grabs a book, and sneaks into her bedroom. Then stays in there and doesn’t come out. Not even for, like, snacks. I doubt she even reads half those books.”
    “You said she gamed you?”
    “I didn’t want the books out here. I suggested she put them in the cellar, but she said the cellar was damp, and her books meant a lot. I was like, they’re just books. It’s not like they’re the Bible. Then she said if I want to use her furniture . . . and I need a place to plop and watch the tube. All I had before was milk crates and beanbag chairs. So—”
    “So you and Mandy don’t get along?”
    “My ad said Roommate wanted, not Friend Wanted.”
    “Can I see her room?”
    “Not much to see.” She scratched at a rash on her neck and flung her eyes toward the narrow corridor. “Last room on the left.”
    The bedroom was as promised: a shoebox. A twin bed without a headboard or a footboard was centered on the opposite wall from the door, maybe three feet of space around it. Above the bed, a faded poster of Warhol’s Monroe was tacked crookedly. The rest of the bare white walls were peppered with nail and tack holes.
    The bedsheets were tossed back in a twisted heap. On a pink bedspread, an image of Betty Boop performed a jig. Rath pinched a corner of the top sheet between his fingers and thumb and lifted it. An open book sat beneath it. Black and Blue. Rath had never heard of it. He read the jacket cover. The book was about a mother who fled an abusive husband and changed her identity. Is that what you’ve done, Rath wondered, fled, changed your identity ? He scribbled the book’s title in his notebook.
    The drawer of an Ikea nightstand was ajar. Rath stuck the pencil in the drawer’s gap and pulled the drawer open to find a hairbrush, nail polish in hot colors named Rupture, Purge, Hipnotic. Pens and pencils, a raffle-ticket stub, Midol, a pad of paper. He paused and looked at the header of the notepad. Starmont Hotels and Resorts.
    The notepad was pristine, no indentations from writing. He tucked it in his jacket pocket, then looked under the bed. A cat raked his face with its claws, then squirted past him. Wincing, Rath stood and wiped at blood on his cheek, the scratch itching and swelling. “Cat Scratch Fever.” That right-wing nutjob Nugent had gotten it right in the one crummy song on which he’d based his entire offensive life.
    Rath opened the closet’s folding doors to find clothes spilling from milk crates. Acid-washed jeans in black and blue. Corduroys and sundresses. Tank tops and T-shirts with Wonder Woman, Betty Boop, and Marilyn. Black Ts that read, JOHN DEERE and GOT CH OICE?
    Panties, plain white cotton, tossed in a pile. No bras.
    He searched pockets and found one business card. It had been through the wash, and he could not read it. He closed the closet door.
    On the way down the hall, he slipped into the bathroom and shut the door. The bathroom was spotless, the chrome-sink fixtures mirroring his distorted image back at him in miniature. The room smelled strongly of bleach though not strongly enough to cover the stench of the litter box next to the toilet. He wondered what Luminol would pick up: The place seemed somehow too immaculate. Had it been cleaned and scoured after an altercation?
    Under the sink were boxes of panty liners, tampons, creams and ointments and powders, a toilet-bowl scrubber.
    He opened the medicine cabinet, a metal job with