Read The Girl On Legare Street for Free Online

hand on my arm. “Mellie, this is serious. I think this is related to my dream, and if it is, then you’re in more danger than I thought.”
    “Then I’ll deal with it. Alone. Like I have for thirty-three years.” I shook my arm free and stepped over the tape.
    “Do you remember the day your grandmother died?”
    I stopped, an old memory pushing at my brain like a scar that hadn’t faded enough to let you forget what caused it completely. “Yes,” I said. “She fell down the stairs.” Slowly, I faced my mother. A look of relief passed over her face, and I realized that she hadn’t expected me to stay.
    She continued. “She was still alive when I found her at the bottom of the steps.”
    “That’s not what the police report said. She tripped on her high heels and fell. She died immediately.” I only knew this because of some perverse curiosity that had made me search through my father’s papers once when he was on yet another drinking binge. In a childlike rage, I had hoped to find the reason my mother had abandoned me documented somewhere. As if by seeing it in black-and-white, I could find a way to defend myself. But all I’d found were my parents’ divorce papers stating the reason as irreconcilable differences and a copy of the police report concerning my grandmother’s sudden death.
    My mother raised an elegant eyebrow but didn’t ask me how I knew. It was like I was a little girl again and she knew all there was to know about me, which always made it that much harder to handle her abandonment. Everything she knew about me wasn’t enough to make her stay.
    She dipped her head and I could see her struggling for composure. “I held her head in my lap while she died. I heard her last words.”
    My lips were numb from the cold and something else I didn’t want to name. “What did she say?”
    Her eyes met mine. “We are not as we seem.”
    I shivered inside of my coat, the old memory pressing at my brain again. “What does that mean?” My voice was swept away by a gust of wind, and I realized again that my mother didn’t need to hear me to understand what I was saying.
    She looked past me, toward the toppled gravestone. “I don’t know. But there’s something in that house. Something evil. A presence in the house that’s been there since I was born.”
    I swallowed. “Is that why you sold it?”
    She nodded but didn’t meet my eyes.
    “Then why do you want to buy the house back? If it’s haunted by an evil presence, why?”
    My mother didn’t answer right away but didn’t move her gaze from my face, either. “Because it’s our house, Mellie. Because it was in our family for over two hundred years.” She paused. “And I’m stronger now. I can fight it now.” She closed her mouth tightly, as if she were afraid unguarded words would leak out, and I knew right away that she was hiding something. The nuances of a mother’s face are never lost on her children, even long after a child may have wanted to forget.
    My hands balled into fists again. “Don’t stress yourself on my account, Mother. I have my own house now, so it’s immaterial to me what you do with the house on Legare. Just don’t try to pretend that you’re concerned about my legacy, because we both know that would be a lie.”
    She took a step in my direction, her breath fanning out toward me like a web. “There’s so much you don’t understand, Mellie, and I don’t expect you to sit down with me and listen while I try to explain it to you. Just know that my dreams and what’s happened here and what’s written on her gravestone are all related. Your grandmother needs us to stand together on this, to face what’s coming.”
    I looked at her for a long moment, seeing only a stranger. I watched as the wind blew the fur around her face and flattened the winter grass like a giant’s footprint and knew there was more to why she was here. But like her reasons for leaving, her reasons for returning were no longer