Read Silence - eARC for Free Online

am gonna give Dad the guilt trip of a lifetime over this.
    She was actually sweaty and panting by the time she reached the house. Mom was already gone, and all but one slice of the pizza she’d bought had been eaten. I guess it was a good thing I did the grocery thing then… She put the stuff away, snarfed a snack cake, and went out to the living room to start hauling the last of her things upstairs.

Chapter Three
    Now that she was doing more exploring of the house, it was clear that none of the furniture was Mom’s. It was all old…nothing seemed to be newer than the 1950s and a lot was like, Victorian old. Most of that was big, heavy pieces, too big to get out the door, like huge dressers and sideboards, and big beds. None of it had been taken care of well, most of it had been painted and repainted and repainted again, and where there were chips you could see six or seven layers of paint.
    The bedroom she had picked out for herself had a couple of those big, heavy dressers, a wardrobe instead of a closet, and a white-painted iron bedstead, the kind that “shabby chic” people would kill to get their hands on. But it had a set of saggy bedsprings instead of a proper set of box springs, and the mattress was flat and hard. The cover was faded to a sort of unpleasant uniform yellow-gray. She still had aches from trying to sleep on it last night.
    Maybe there’s something better in the attic. She knew better than to ask Mom to get a new mattress. It would be like asking a butterfly to do it. If she even remembered, which was doubtful, she’d just say there wasn’t enough money, and why pay for something the landlord had already supplied?
    There was an actual set of stairs up to the attic, and a kind of hinged, drop-down door to it. She listened hard before opening it, thinking about mice. And rats. And bugs.…As a New Yorker she was no stranger to cockroaches, but you could usually get rid of the things by fumigating the place every so often. She rather doubted anyone had ever fumigated this house, and who knew what kind of scary bugs or spiders were lurking up there?
    On the other hand, if you had to get up high to get any cell phone coverage, maybe the attic was high enough she might be able to get a couple of bars. That thought finally made her push the door up.
    During her unpacking, she had discovered some things missing—which explained why Brenda had been so eager to “help.” All the jewelry she had inherited from her grandma was gone—three rings, a pair of diamond earrings and a diamond necklace. They were all that Staci had to remember her by. Only the cocktail ring was worth much money, but they were all hers; Gramma had wanted her to have them, to keep and to cherish, and Brenda had no right to any of it! A couple of her sexier dresses were gone too, including the cute beaded minidress she’d worn for New Year’s Eve. And she knew darned well she and Brenda were the same size.
    So if she could get some cell reception, bringing that up ought to be enough to get Dad to cough up something like a new mattress, and should be good enough for an increase on the allowance on that debit card.
    The attic was thick with dust. It was pretty obvious that not only had Mom never been up here, neither had anyone else for a long time. The two windows, one at either end of the peaked roof, were lightly coated with cobwebs, but there didn’t seem to be any active spiders or other bugs up here. She went to the nearer window to see if it could be opened.
    After she beat the cobwebs away with what looked like a piece of old curtain, she did manage to pry it up. Gingerly, she eased herself out and perched on the window ledge, holding her phone up into the air, and got…one bar. Which was a heck of a lot better than no bars.
    Dad was hopeless when it came to texts, so she opened her email app and furiously thumbed out a long, long email, beginning with the discovery that her stuff was missing. She didn’t outright accuse