Read miss fortune mystery (ff) - bloodshed in the bayou for Free Online Page B

anxious. Panicky.  Maybe I was more like an oyster with a grain of sand.
    Where does one start looking for something they never knew existed in a place they’d always lived? It felt like a riddle where the answer made me out to be a joke. Okay, let’s take this practically. The downstairs consisted of a kitchen, living room and dining room. The kitchen seemed like a safe bet. Mom had liked to cook. Could whatever Ida Belle was referring to be in there?
    I started with the cupboards, opening each one, feeling around inside for hidden panels or false backs like a Nancy Drew whose father kept asking when she was going to get a real job. In other words, I felt a little idiotic. Using a chair, I checked from the top, down. Every drawer was pulled out, emptied and searched.
    Nothing. There were no secret hiding places. I checked between and under the appliances but unless whatever I was looking for was made of menacing-looking dust bunnies, I found zilch. I moved the kitchen table and checked beneath the old rag rug. Not so much as a post-it note. Crawling around under the table and looking under the seats of the chairs was useless too.
    I continued this way into the dining and living rooms. At one point I got excited finding a packet taped to the back of the china cabinet, but it was just appliance warrantees. A few hours later, I broke for lunch, inhaling a club sandwich and some sweet tea before standing at the foot of the stairs, looking up.
    Only three rooms were left, the bathroom, my bedroom and Mom’s room. As I mounted the stairs, I checked behind each picture lining the wall that led upstairs. The photos of my sister and me in a progression of ages grinned back at me. Why had I kept them? From kindergarten to senior year, my sister and I’d had our picture taken together every summer. It was a ritual we’d hated as kids that I appreciated now.
    Maybe that’s why I’d never taken them down. The pictures were a reminder that we’d had a pretty good life here with just Mom. The little girls in the photos were laughing and hugging like best friends. And we had been, back then.
    Before Mom went nuts when we were in college, I’d had only happy memories of our lives in this house. In fact, there weren’t many moments when we’d even thought about the father who’d left.
    Mom never said anything about him.
    Wait. That wasn’t right. She had said something once. I looked at the picture of Peggy Sue and me when we were about fifteen. That was when things started to change a little between us. My sister became more girly, interested in boys and clothes. I, on the other hand, spent more and more time outside, running around the woods and swamps. Dreaming of when I’d be done with school and could be outside all the time.
    Something around that time…Mom had said…what was it she’d said? Something about us being different from each other. Something about Dad. I closed my eyes as if that would help. It didn’t. I stared at the next photo, the one taken when we were sixteen – when we’d started to look different. Peggy Sue wore makeup, paid a lot of attention to her hair and the way she dressed, while I stood beside her with messy hair, no makeup, wearing a sweatshirt.
    People noticed and realized they could finally tell us apart. Most of the time, everyone paid more attention to Peggy Sue, who positively glowed under the attention. I spent most of my time avoiding people with my nose in a book or running around the bayou.
    Mom had said that we…ARG! It was right there, but I couldn’t get hold of it. A vital clue was screaming in my head to be recognized, but I couldn’t grab it. I looked at the photo from our senior year in high school. At this point, we didn’t look like each other anymore. Peggy Sue had bleached her hair that year and wore it in long, bouncy curls.
    My hair was dirty blonde and short, and I wore horned rimmed glasses. Even our eyes were different because Peggy Sue was trying out green