Read Covenant for Free Online

room and put her hands on Brenda’s shoulders.
    “What is it? Did Bill cancel on you for tomorrow night?”
    “It’s not about me,” Brenda had stammered. “It’s about…James.”
    Cindy’s face stretched as her eyes widened. “What about him?”
    “He—Your mom called earlier.”
    Brenda gently pushed Cindy down onto her bed.
    “What’s the matter with him? Tell me!”
    Brenda’s face turned funny. Her lips pursed and opened, but then closed without uttering a word. And then they blurted it out: “Cindy, James jumped off a cliff last night.”
    “Oh, God. Oh, my God.”
    Cindy didn’t wait for the impact of the news to be felt. She jumped up and ran to her closet. Her suitcase was in the back, and she pulled it out and threw it on the bed.
    “What are you doing?” Brenda asked. “Why don’t you call your mom before you go packing up?”
    “I have to get home. I have to be there. I should have been there.”
    Cindy sank down to the cold tile of the floor.
    “I should never have left him. I should have known this would happen.”
    “How could you know?” Brenda had asked, and then recoiled from the black look in her friend’s eyes.
    “I knew if he stayed in Terrel he’d be doomed, just like all the others.”
       
    Those words echoed in her head again and again all week. She heard them as she hugged Mrs. Canady at the wake, and then again as she knelt before her old boyfriend’s casket.
    “Why wouldn’t you come with me?” she whispered at the still, white face before her. But he didn’t answer.
    The wake had been bad, but it got worse.
    When the funeral procession stopped at the open hole in the ground at the cemetery, a cold stone dropped in her stomach.
    I will never see his face again , she thought as the casket was carried across the green to the grave. Never .
    Then the preacher talked about God and taking lambs back to heaven and a bunch of other crap.
    God had nothing to do with this! she wanted to scream.
    But she hadn’t.
    She’d watched as they threw dirt on the casket, as Mrs. Canady and Mrs. Kelly and Mrs. Sander stood around the grave. She saw Mrs. Sander talk to and then angrily walk away from a young man with a notebook. And she saw the crazy lady, Angelica Napalona, bolt from the cemetery before anyone else.
    Then she had come home and cried.
    His face kept coming back to haunt her. His picture stared at her from her old white bureau. The trinkets from their high school dances still hung from her mirror across the room. She could even hear his voice, telling her that he couldn’t go away to school. That he couldn’t leave Terrel.
    She cupped her hands over her ears, willing that voice to go out of her head and instead become flesh before her. Willing James to be alive again. To be with her.
    But the room remained silent except for the uneven gasps of her breath.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Despite the hawkeyed glares bestowed on whisperers by old Mrs. Malone the library wasn’t nearly as quiet as Cindy Marshfield’s bedroom. Joe could hear the quiet chatter of schoolkids gossiping in the aisles of bookshelves around him, and the microfilm machine spoke in its own rhythm, squealing of unoiled cogs and humming in complaint at power long denied.
    Joe scrolled through screen after screen of old headlines, reading of school board elections and weather predictions, the zoning grant that allowed the construction of the warehouse-like Wal-Mart and the fence permit for Mrs. Ola Levinthal of Elm Street. The obituaries were slim but steady over the months of newspapers he searched; mostly older folks who had passed on from heart attacks and “natural causes.” A couple drownings, roadside accidents and even a domestic homicide.
    Mrs. Malone had been no help at all to him.
    “What is it you’re looking for, young man?” she’d asked, crone eyes boring into his own with uncanny brilliance.
    “I’m trying to find the obituaries of Margaret Kelly and William Sander,” he’d answered.