Under the Harrow: by Flynn Berry Read Free Book Online Page B

under his jaw. He grabbed her hand in the air and snapped her arm, then trappedit under his knee. He bounced her head against the pavement and her scalp turned wet.
    He continued to beat her in the stomach and face. Then he stood on the balls of his feet and looked down at her. She cradled her wet head.
    She tried to lie still but her body jerked and convulsed. When the seizing stopped, she crawled to her knees, then to her feet, and the ground wheeled. She backed away, because if she turned around he would return from behind the houses, with his short bobbing steps, and pull her to the ground again.
    She shuffled across the road. Her left arm was broken and she held it against her chest. As she retreated, her eyes skipped along the gaps between the houses. She heard herself breathing, rapid inhalations pumping her chest.

10
    W HAT HAPPENED IN Rachel’s house on Friday didn’t fit with anything outside of it. The professor’s house across the road. The neighbor riding her horse. The elm trees, the car in the drive.
    It doesn’t make any sense. There were people in the village, dozens of them, a mile from where she was killed. When I arrived, the town was quiet, like the snow had already started. I saw a woman leaving the library with a stack of books. A man looking at cakes in the bakery window. One of the village employees lifting a sheaf of papers from the seat beside him and climbing from his van. People maneuvering their cars through the narrow streets, listening to the forecast. It was like something set down on Rachel’s house, upending it, while the rest of the town was left untouched.
    It doesn’t make any sense, except that it has happened before. The rest of a town undisturbed while something is loosed on her.

11
    “ W AS RACHEL EVER ON medication for a mental illness?” asks Moretti. It’s midmorning on Tuesday, and on the other side of the door, the incident room is crowded. Moretti appears relaxed, and I hope that means they’re making progress.
    “No.”
    “Have you ever been?”
    “Yes.”
    “What for?”
    “Depression. I started on a course of Wellbutrin in June.”
    It all caught up to me, the end of my relationship, every other loss. When I saw myself in a mirror, I looked hunted. I was tired all the time, and often had a rising sense of panic in innocuous places—a cake shop, a museum, the rose garden in Regent’s Park.
    “Are you still taking it?”
    “No. I stopped in October.”
    “On the advice of your psychologist?”
    “She said it was my decision.” I was better after Cornwall. I had changed since my first visit to the psychologist’s office.
    “Why was Rachel unmarried?” he asks.
    “She valued other things. Why are you not married?”
    “I’m divorced,” he says, as though it answers the question. “It sounds like Rachel could be unpleasant.”
    “I liked that about her.”
    He smiles, and I have the sense that he agrees with me, and understands her. She matters to him now in a way that’s different than with anyone else.

12
    “ I ’M SORRY. I’m so sorry I didn’t go with you.”
    “Don’t apologize,” she said. She lowered her face and pried her rope bracelet from under the hospital wristband. The pale gold straw was now stiff and rust colored, and she began to work it off with her teeth.
    When I first saw her, I started to cry and Rachel tilted her head at me. This was a second shock. Her eyes were so swollen I had thought they were closed and that she was asleep. Her appearance frightened me, like the bashed-up girl was the scary thing instead of what had happened to her.
    Her face was swollen and garish. Her mouth was twice its normal size, as though she had drawn around it with lipstick, and both of her eyes were almost hidden under black bulges. Someone had combed her hair, and the comb left raked lines in her scalp. A greasy ointment covered the stitches on her brow and cheek. One arm was folded across her body in a sling.
    We were at the hospital in