Read The Thirteen for Free Online Page B

she could hear it.
    Audra had never been a stupid woman
    (until recently)
    and even as she thought that, a car pulled into the parking lot. It was an old red thing, rusted around the wheel wells.
    “Oh my, look at that—a car,” Izzy said excitedly. She turned to Audra. “It’s them.” She turned back to watch a young woman and a girl of about twelve get out of the car. Its doors slammed shut, the sound muffled and distant from the second-floor window. “Oh my,” Izzy said. “From the state of their car it looks like they’ve fallen on hard times. This may be easier than I thought.” She clucked her tongue.
    “I’ll tell them to leave.”
    Izzy spun around and pointed at Audra. “You’ll do no such thing.” She flipped open her compact, which was still in her hand. “Do you want to see yourself? What you’ve done?” She raised the mirror in front of Audra. “Look,” she hissed. “See how beautiful you’ve become.”
    Audra glanced reluctantly at the mirror, then gasped. Staring back at her was a pair of yellow eyes, the pupils elongated, black and soulless, like a serpent’s. She shrieked and covered her face with her hands.
    Izzy snapped the compact shut with a scowl. “That’s what you get for betraying the sisterhood,” she hissed. “Judas. Judas.” Then she leaned in very close and said into Audra’s ear, “Judas goat.”
    Audra squealed and clawed at her face with her hands, ran them down her arms, her sides, eyes frantically searching the room for another reflective surface. There was none.
    “Izzy, my god—”
    “You don’t want that to happen to your pretty daughter, do you? Or her pretty bastard? So shush now.” She opened the compact again and fixed her own hair, pinched her cheeks. “Those nasty weird eyes of yours only show in a mirror. Paula won’t notice a thing.”
    Audra whimpered, “She doesn’t belong with us.”
    “Honey, think of it as a fourth for bridge.”
    Rowan had been dozing the past few miles or so and Paula wasn’t sure if she wanted to wake her. The turn signal click-clicked as she took the off-ramp from the highway and followed the curve through a deceptively thin treeline to the road into Haven Woods.
    A silly kind of excitement had started to build in her. She’d been gone more or less since she was sixteen and didn’t think she’d ever been truly homesick, yet she had butterflies.
    Rowan stirred, woken by the car’s slowing down. She raised her head and looked groggily out the window.
    “Look,” Paula said and pointed to a billboard thirty feet high. It showed a happy family in front of a lovely house. WELCOME TO HAVEN WOODS!
    Paula turned right, checking off old haunts in her head.
    smoking behind the Casey’s Lumber sign
    watching the boys play football in the big field behind the school she and Marla walking the perimeter of Haven Woods over and
    over again the winter they were bored
    hanging out the second-floor window of Mrs. Hagen’s class at lunch
    She was smiling. Thinking of old faces —Patty, Lonnie Sanderson, Pete Kelly —people she hadn’t thought of in years. It didn’t stop there, of course …
    David under the bleachers at the
    David on the riverbank when
    David sweating after ball practice, grinning
    still want to kiss me?
    His scent stirred in the air of Haven Woods, the river, the bakery, the lime on the ball field—Paula could almost smell him.
    “Where’s Grandma’s house?” Rowan said, sitting up.
    Paula pointed a few blocks ahead of them. “That’s our street there. Proctor.” She grinned. “Everybody lived on Proctor. It’s a bay that loops around the whole suburb. But we won’t go there yet. We’ll go to the hospital first.”
    Once they had passed the big brick school, Paula found herself slowing to a near crawl, watching for the tall tower of the hospital where the big glowing H was mounted, like a crucifix. When she was a little girl, she’d thought the H was for Haven Woods, not Hospital.
    She could