Read Gallows Hill for Free Online

bellowed with a macho laugh, and a girl with no laughter in her voice said, "You are so crude, Danny."
     
    "What's going on?" Kyra's voice came crackling through the earphones. "Why is the crowd breaking up? It isn't time to close down yet."
     
    "Don't you try to tell me what to do," Sarah said out loud, although of course there was no way Kyra could hear her.
     
    She pulled off the earphones so that she would no longer have to be subjected to Kyra's voice, although she had been hearing it for so long now that it still echoed in her head. Then she took off the Gypsy outfit and dumped everything into a tote bag that she had stashed beneath the table. Under the costume she had been wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and when she lifted the back flap of the tent and stepped out into the gym, nobody gave her a second glance.
     
    Charlie had been right, the crowds were definitely thinning out. The elementary-school children had pretty much disappeared, but a number of high-school students were still horsing around, shoving each other's heads into the Dunk for Apples tank and tossing battered-looking pumpkins at the dummy on the gallows. She caught a glimpse of her mother and Ted standing by the door with Ted's nine-year-old son, Brian.
     
    Sarah hoped this didn't mean that Ted's kids were coming home with them. The last thing she wanted to do was join the group, but there was no way to avoid it, since they were obviously waiting for her.
     
    Her mother saw her approaching and gave her a big smile.
     
    "From the comments I've heard, the fortune-telling booth was a huge success! I kept hearing people raving about the fabulous Madam Zoltanne!"
     
    "Great job, Gypsy lady!" Eric called to her, striding toward them across the gym, with Kyra, as usual, bobbing along beside him as though attached by an unseen thread.
     
    "Boy, what a night!" he exclaimed enthusiastically as he came up to her. "We haven't had a chance to tally up yet, but from the looks of the cashbox, we're going to have one great prom."
     
    "We had good promotion," Kyra said.
     
    "And some red-hot drawing cards. Like I predicted, your booth was the hit of the evening, Sarah. I wanted to get my own fortune told, but the line was too long. How would you feel about giving me a private reading?"
     
    "You know it was a hoax," Sarah said.
     
    "But a fun sort of hoax. Everybody loved it."
     
    "Can we go to your house and eat brownies?" Brian asked Rosemary, who now directed her smile at him and said, "We certainly can, honey."
     
    "Do you want to come back to Rosemary's?" Ted asked his daughter, wording the question for Eric's sake in such a way as to mask the fact that he was living there as well.
     
    "No, I've got other plans," Kyra said. "A bunch of the kids are going to the Halloween Special midnight movie. Eric will take me home afterward."
     
    She put a slight emphasis on the word home, another subtlety that Sarah caught but was in this case far from opposed to. It was nice to know that Kyra recognized that her "home" was with her mother.
     
    "Want to join us, Sarah?" Eric asked as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
     
    "I don't know... ," Sarah said, taken by surprise. She had no desire to do anything social with Kyra, but it was Eric, not Kyra, who was inviting her, and this was the first time anyone in Pine Crest had asked her to do anything. She was on the verge of accepting, when she suddenly remembered the sad state of her finances. She had two dollar bills and a small amount of change in her jeans pocket.
     
    "Our treat, for both of you girls," her mother said quickly.
     
    "Right!" Ted agreed, groping in his pocket for his wallet.
     
    "I don't need money," Kyra said. "You gave me my allowance yesterday."
     
    "Sarah... ?"
     
    "I'm fine too," Sarah said stiffly. "I'm just tired, but thanks anyway, Eric. It was nice of you to ask me."
     
    They left the gym together and split up in the parking lot. Sarah got into the backseat of Ted's