Total pages in book: 155
Estimated words: 152045 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 760(@200wpm)___ 608(@250wpm)___ 507(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 152045 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 760(@200wpm)___ 608(@250wpm)___ 507(@300wpm)
They didn’t know I was coming tonight, though. I don’t think they had a chance to throw together a prank.
Or plan a murder.
Right now, most of the people I care about don’t know where I am or what I’m doing, and I kind of like that, because I’m always the one chasing.
Chasing Kade’s notice.
Chasing my dad and his approval.
Chasing Hunter.
If I completely disappear, maybe they’ll wonder about me for once.
I start after Farrow, the others staying behind.
He opens the door to the house, a small light glowing in the foyer. I see a hardwood floor, the sheen worn away, and stairs leading up to the second floor. A gloomy lantern hangs over the top landing.
He holds the door open, and I step inside, hearing him close it behind me.
I cast my eyes in a long sweep over the area. What appears to be a living room sits to my right. There’s a green velvet couch and a small end table, but nothing else. No TV that I can see.
I arch my neck though the entryway, seeing a refrigerator in the next space, but I can’t see the whole kitchen from here.
There’s a hallway ahead, more doorways, possibly to a dining room and bathroom. There’s probably a back door, but I’m not sure about a yard. The houses are close together.
I don’t see parents. No host family.
“About twenty years ago, there was a flood here,” Farrow tells me. “You knew that, right?”
I shift, the gritty unvarnished floor grinding under my shoes.
“Yes,” I mumble.
We climbed higher in elevation from the bridge to get to Knock Hill, but the river isn’t the only thing that threatens to flood during heavy rains.
The waterfalls my town is named after empty into a pool that feeds a stream that overflows into a spillway when needed.
But that year, as I was told, the spillway didn’t hold.
The highway was washed out, people literally had to stop their cars, get out, and run.
“Shelburne Falls had the infrastructure to keep the overflow at bay,” he tells me. “We didn’t, because our city budget went right into bad peoples’ pockets. They got rich, driving this town into the ground.”
It would be unrealistic to harbor a grudge against my town over weather that we couldn’t control, but if I were them, I might be bitter. It’s understandable. I’m just impressed he knows the City of Weston is to blame too.
The water filled this neighborhood like dirty water in a shallow teacup, and even though these houses sit six feet off the ground, relatively safe, the businesses downtown didn’t survive. The owners, many of them Knock Hill residents, evacuated.
“And most of Weston never came back,” he says.
Even after the water receded…
It was this week, twenty-two years ago, in fact. The same year the last girl from Shelburne Falls was a prisoner here.
She was in this house.
There were brothers.
Pranks, parties, the big game…
And rain. There was lots of rain.
But no one knows what happened in this house. I don’t think people in Weston even know that their story started in the Falls, either.
In Carnival Tower.
It’s an old speakeasy hidden away, between Rivertown—the bar and grill on High Street—and Frosted, my aunt Quinn’s bake shop. Only a few of us know it’s there, tucked away between the walls to unsuspecting people walking by on the sidewalk.
Our story tells of a Weston guy in love with a Falls girl, but she hated him. In his desperation, he killed himself, and his best friend—along with his crew—invaded a house one night while she was babysitting. Some say he intended to kill her. Get revenge. But the story says he seduced her instead, up against the floor-to-ceiling mirror that still hangs in Quinn’s shop.
And some say the boy who reportedly killed himself over her watched his friend get revenge for him from the other side of the glass.
We discovered through old cell phones left in the tower that they weren’t friends at all. They were brothers—twins—and maybe, just maybe, the one who loved her faked his death to plot revenge. Or maybe, he was the one pinning her up against the glass, finally getting what he wanted.
The story goes that they decided to prolong their payback. They let her live that night and invented the tradition of the prisoner exchange to get her across the river and into their house instead. This house.
“You want the place?” Farrow asks me.
I turn my head. “What?”
He approaches me, hands in his pockets. “You’re going to have freedom here you’ve never known.” The vein under the Green Street tattoo on his tan neck throbs. “No supervision. No curfews. And we’ll get you keys to a bike.”
My eyes widen.
“Yeah, I know all about you and your daddy not training you.” He smirks, suddenly looking twelve instead of nineteen. “You’re going to have a great time here, kid.”