Gretchen: A Thriller by Shannon Kirk

Author:Shannon Kirk [Kirk, Shannon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542041348
Published: 2019-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

I don’t want you to move.

I hope your mom chills out.

I heard you yelling in the house.

Oh, and p.s. Sorry, but I know who you are.

I figured it out. Do you know who you are?

I think you don’t know who you are.

Come to the “dead room” if you want me to tell you what I know.

I’m doing a puzzle. We can do a puzzle all night.

Or you can sleep in my bed.

—Gretchen

What?

What?

Do I know who I am? Does she know who I am?

And she’s down there doing a puzzle?

Why did she put my name in quotes? Like Lucy’s not my name.

The silence in this room is weird silence, like the first night I came here. And there is no piano, like I thought I heard. No noise. Nothing.

I can’t breathe in this soundless house.

Wait a minute. What?

I read the note again.

My hands are trembling. This is sinking in.

Does she know who I am?

Who am I?

Aren’t I fake-name Lucy? Mom’s never told me my real birth name.

I never did get the guts to run any more searches on Foulin. What’s that Dickens quote—“We forge the chains we wear in life.” Is that the quote?

What did Gretchen discover?

I sneak down the foyer stairs. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do, where I’m going to go. But I’m walking down Gretchen’s stairs on tiptoes. When I reach the second-to-last stair and am about to step into the fossil foyer, a noise bangs at the end of the hall to the right—the one that’s a normal width. Another bang from within that hall, and I’m pretty sure the noise is from behind the ivory door Gretchen told me not to open on the first night. The piano starts up in the belly of the house to my left.

A haunting echo of her note plays in my mind: “Come to the ‘dead room’ if you want me to tell you what I know.” She wants to bait me down her mazes. She wants to trap me. She wants to make me flinch.

I jump to the foyer, nearly collide with Jerry’s tower of Crock-Pots, which hasn’t moved all summer, pop open the front door, and dash outside in the wind.

Some instinct is pulling me back down the hill to Mom. I suddenly need to find her.

Do I know who I am? Who am I?

I left my clothes in Gretchen’s room. I’m in her white mini nightgown. No shoes. My pendant bangs on my chest.

I’m running down the dirt road to our rental ranch. The wind howls around, in and out, up and over the blueberry-holly hill between Gretchen’s and the low, long shed, the sounds morphing into blooms of screaming, as if each blueberry bush is a blowhole, exhaling agony inhaled through the mouths of the holly mounds. The hill is the earth in death throes, dying.

When I reach the parking space between our ranch and the long, low shed, I see the Volvo is still here and my bike and helmet are dumped on the ground.

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