Read Lullaby (A Watersong Novel) for Free Online

was afraid he might not have a job waiting for him. When he didn’t come back after an hour, she let out a sigh of relief and moved on.
    The first half of the day she spent calling every missing children’s organization she could find. None of them put Gemma high on their list, because of her age and because she’d left willingly.
    Once Harper had exhausted all the organizations, she sat by the phone at the kitchen table trying to think of other people to call or anywhere else to look. But she was coming up empty.
    Harper and Gemma had lived their whole lives in Capri, and they didn’t have close ties with anybody outside it. Their grandparents were dead, and they had an aunt and a couple cousins who lived in Canada, but they didn’t really know them.
    That was when Harper noticed the state of the house and decided to do something about it. There was really nothing else for her to do, at least not anything that could help her with Gemma or the sirens, and she had to put her nervous energy to work. She couldn’t just sit there staring at the phone all day, willing it to ring.
    So she cleaned.
    Harper started with the laundry, since it was overflowing, and then moved on to the living room. She threw away garbage, vacuumed, and dusted. In the kitchen she scrubbed the floors, cleaned out the fridge, and rearranged the pots and the pans in the cupboards.
    Alex came over shortly after Harper decided to tackle the basement. Every Christmas, when they brought up the tree and the ornaments, Harper vowed to go through the old boxes and get rid of junk and organize the keepsakes. She finally decided that today would be the day.
    “Harper?” Alex was upstairs calling her name, and, based on the creaking of his footsteps above her head, she guessed he was in the living room.
    “I’m down here!” Harper shouted toward the basement steps, hoping he’d hear her.
    She was sitting in an old lawn chair, which she’d had to steal from a very large daddy longlegs spider. Once the chair was clean of cobwebs, she’d sat down with an old box on her lap and started rummaging through it.
    So far, the box’s contents appeared to be papers and projects from when Harper and Gemma were little. All of the papers had their mother’s writing on them, like Harper—First Grade, Age 7 or Gemma—Mother’s Day Card, Age 3 scrawled across the back.
    That also explained why the box only contained items from until Harper was in third grade and Gemma was in first. That was the year when Nathalie had been in the car accident, and although Brian loved his daughters, he’d never been as good about keeping things as their mother had.
    Harper pulled out a photo that was bent and faded with age. It had been glued onto a piece of pink construction paper cut into the shape of a lopsided heart. In sloppy cursive across the top, it said My Family in Gemma’s handwriting.
    The photo showed the four of them, Brian, Nathalie, Harper, and Gemma, at the beach. Gemma and Harper were wearing matching bathing suits—purple, with white flowers and a ruffle around the bottom. Harper had nearly forgotten about that day, but it was eleven years ago.
    They all looked so happy—even Gemma, who hadn’t wanted to come out of the water for the picture. Nathalie had had to bribe her with an ice-cream cone.
    “Harper?” Alex said uncertainly from the top of the basement steps, pulling her from her thoughts.
    “Yeah.” Harper put the picture back in the box, then set the box aside.
    “Sorry, I just let myself in,” Alex said as he came down the steps. “I knocked, but you didn’t answer.”
    “No, it’s okay.” Harper stood up and brushed the dust from her knees. The boxes had been sitting down here so long, they’d collected a lot of dirt and cobwebs. “I must not have heard you knocking.”
    When Alex came downstairs, he glanced around the basement, which was dimly lit by a few bulbs hanging from the ceiling. He had a brown leather laptop bag slung over his