The Speed of Mercy by Christy Conlin (good books for high schoolers txt) 📕

flight, go back to California. She had cancellation insurance because her mother insisted on that. Mal would tell her mother the truth. If only her father were alive. He would know what she should do. She put her head on the steering wheel, feeling the vibration of the running engine in her skull, the cold air from the vent blasting on her face, and her eyes starting to leak tears. Her instincts were good when it came to that clench in her gut — the one that told her she’d made a mistake or was in something way too deep. There were backstage politicians in this story, powerful people — if her feelings about the depth of this were correct, the slightest whisper of inquiry or whiff of curiosity could awaken a depraved monster she couldn’t even imagine. She shuddered as she thought about Flora’s so-called suicide. And that fire so many years ago.

The air conditioning was irritating her sinuses, making her eyes bulge. She put the windows down and turned the car off. There was staggered traffic on the highway behind her, a few birds singing. Mal was not the sort who scared easily. Unfortunately, she was usually oblivious to fear when she should be fleeing. Fear always came too late. When she felt resistance, it mustered intrigue and temporary fortitude. Challenge summoned momentary courage. And then her confidence shattered and the truth would stand before her, a taunting demon that would crawl into her head and beat on her brain, making her temples throb as they were now. She would find a hotel for the night. See how she felt in the morning, maybe find a doctor. And then she would reassess.

Just then she heard a car behind her. It was a police car. Pulling up beside her. Stopping. Drops of sweat trickled into Mal’s eye and stung but she kept her hands on the steering wheel. The police officer put his window down. He was young, with short blond hair and dark sunglasses. “Everything okay, Miss? Car troubles?”

“Everything’s fine. Just pulled over to take a call my from mother,” Mal lied, hands shaking on the steering wheel. She wanted to grab her phone, but her mother spoke in her head. Mal, hands on the steering wheel. Was he going to make her get out of the car?

The cop nodded. “Beautiful day. If you pull over again, you might want to do it right on the shoulder, so your car’s fully off the road. You never know when some yahoo is going to come roaring along in some jacked-up truck.” He drove off, glancing back in his rear-view mirror. Mal watched his car until it disappeared around the bend in the road ahead, trembling as she rubbed her burning eyes.

The Fundy Waves Motel was conveniently across the street from the Soldier’s Memorial Hospital. There was a neon-red Vacant sign. Mal parked at the motel and went to the hospital. The doctor in emergency peered in her mouth. Strep throat. He put her on antibiotics and told her to drink fluids and get some rest. After a quick stop at the pharmacy, Mal crossed the street to the motel’s reception desk, which was in a convenience store attached to the old motel.

“It’s so hot out,” Mal said to the clerk, fanning herself, hoping the old woman wouldn’t notice her symptoms.

The clerk squinted at Mal and then handed her an old-fashioned key. She pumped the hand sanitizer on the counter into her palms and rubbed her hands together as though wringing out a towel. “Well, the heat won’t last. We’re well into August and summer’s gone, even if it doesn’t seem so. That’s some tan on you. Looks like the heat shouldn’t bother you.”

Mal shivered as she walked back to her room with a bottle of orange juice and some acetaminophen. Thinking she would blend in here was ridiculous.

The room was dated, with wood panelling and 1980s light fixtures, but it was clean and spacious. The entire motel, this strip off the highway, felt left over from another time. A fever. She was so cold. There was a framed picture over the bed of happy children canoeing on a lake. It was old, Norman Rockwell–esque. Mal remembered when she was twelve and went to a goddess camp with her mother in the Santa Cruz mountains, a rite-of-passage sort of place for girls becoming women, with innocent moonlight rituals and canoeing on the lake surrounded by redwoods. They banged on drums and learned about undines, drew anatomically correct mermaids. It seemed eons ago, a simpler and much less complicated time in her life. Here, in this strange rural world, they would think those young girls and their mothers witches or New Age flakes. Dripping with sweat, Mal turned the air conditioning on high and crawled into bed, the loud roar of the old machine blasting away her adult worries.

Cynthia Aoifa Seabury.

Cedar Grove.

Then

A crash from downstairs, under the bedroom floor. Stella jolts awake. Sun pours in through the lacy sheers in the east-facing window. Stella didn’t pull the blind down last night. She isn’t sure why there is now a blind in the window. She only has curtains in her bedroom. Stella doesn’t know where she is. Her bedroom faces west. There shouldn’t be sun in the morning. Then it comes to her. Stella is not in Ohio. She is in Nova Scotia, her first morning in her grandparents’ house. Her stomach growls. There is a dull ache behind her eye. Another bang from downstairs, from the kitchen. Her father is an early riser, getting up at what he calls first light.

Stella pads down the stairs and through the hallway. She opens the kitchen door and her father turns his head at the loud creak. “Good morning, Little Bear,” he calls out. He’s at the stove cooking bacon, wearing an old flowered apron over a wrinkled white short-sleeved shirt.

“Hope I didn’t wake you up. Just knocked that