Total pages in book: 180
Estimated words: 176012 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 880(@200wpm)___ 704(@250wpm)___ 587(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 176012 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 880(@200wpm)___ 704(@250wpm)___ 587(@300wpm)
Turning the page, I see a column of words—some short phrases—written in a frantic script. Some are carved into the paper while others are thrown out like a whip. I stare at the page, trying to figure out some rhyme or reason to the information that looks like a shopping list.
-six nights since you threw me onto the street
I shake my head, confused.
I keep reading.
-warm hands, squeezing my arms like a snake bite
-vein in your neck, memory of it against my lips
-porch light flickers
-rain pelts your shirt to midnight blue
Memories? It looks like a female’s penmanship, if a little wild, but there are no capital letters or periods. No sentence structure, as if she’s narrating.
-flood sirens
-blood streams down your temple
-Deacon in the attic window
-quiet in the street
-door closes
-alone
-quiet
Flood sirens… This could be recounting the night Weston flooded two decades ago.
Who pushed her out of the house? Manas? Deacon was in the attic window, so…
-walking to the river
-no tears
-alone
-hair matting my face like skin
-engine behind me
-white car
-I’m alone
For a moment, I feel wet hair sticking to my cheeks too. I’m there with her. Lost.
Her thoughts are staggered, as if she can’t form cohesive thoughts, even six days later. Watermarks dot the page, ink smeared, because she went back and wrote—and re-wrote—words in the margins.
More etchings of alone and quiet.
-cold hands, squeezing my arms like a snake bite
-more cold hands
-dark
-tires moving through water
She’s hearing things. Not seeing them. Is she blindfolded now? Tied up?
-scratching, break nails, stings
-falling, water
-no tears
-alone
-can’t breathe
-quiet
-forever, quiet forever
-six nights
-six nights, six nights, six nights…
I push my finger up the page, back to falling, water. I’d missed the comma. I thought it said falling water.
But she was falling.
Then…there’s water.
My chest rises and falls, and I let the wheels turn in my head, but I can’t believe them. This has to be a joke. Someone’s rendition of what happened that night, but it’s not the true story. Winslet MacCreary was not the origin of our urban legend about mirrors.
Or the urban legend about the bridge. I scan the murder map again, seeing mentions of Rivalry Week and the stories about the car still at the bottom of the river.
Pay to pass.
I do know that urban legend and where it came from a little more than the Carnival Tower one. A story about a girl who was packed into a car trunk that was forced over the side of the bridge between our two towns.
I hold the diary, my hands shaking.
Whenever people cross the bridge, no matter which way, they flick a coin into the water. Not for luck. Not out of remembrance.
They pay to be allowed to pass unharmed from her ghost that’s still down there.
According to Hawke, Aro, Kade, Dylan, and Hunter’s map, she died there.
Six days later… I’d read.
I lower my eyes to the pages again.
-free
-swimming
-air
I breathe out the faintest…weakest…laugh.
She didn’t die. At least not there. She made it out.
Has Hawke seen this diary?
-alone, she writes again.
-alone
-alone
-alone
I picture the girl in the photo, breaching the surface of the water. The flowing river around her, surging in the storm, the current carrying her. It’s dark, she’s alone, worried to call out for help, because those who put her in the car could still be close.
Does the one who cast her out of the house even know what just happened to her? Could he be the one who did it?
I flip through the journal, seeing pages filled with the same lists, scribble marks, some things X’d out, but more like in anger rather than scribbling out a mistake. There are words carved into the margins and some pages written with script so small, it might take me a day to read a single page.
I set it back on the island and move away for a moment.
I don’t want to be played.
There’s no way to tell for sure if the journal is hers, someone else’s, or if it was forged as part of some bullshit story this Deacon and Manas are playing with my younger family members. There’s a reason Hawke doesn’t have copies of any of its pages on the murder map. As far as I can tell anyway.
But I get an idea, all the same, and head back out the secret entrance and into my bakery. Digging out the memoir my mom gave me more than three years ago detailing her and my father’s love story, I carry it back into the tower and set it down next to Winslet’s journal.
If it moves between now and my next visit, I’ll know someone is still finding a way in here.
But mostly…Carnival Tower seems a place for stories, and it seems like it belongs here.
I sweep the rest of the hideout again, looking for any clues. Underneath beds, around exercise machines, in cabinets and bureaus… Found some handcuffs, which on my first guess might be Kade’s, but I half-suspect Aro uses them on Hawke or Dylan on Hunter. I won’t ask.