The Becket Approval by Falconer Duncan (interesting books to read TXT) 📕

unfolded it greedily, thinking that the only possibility was it must have been left by Nate. He probably had some silly Sherlock Holmes clue up his sleeve that I was meant to follow. I grinned as I unfolded the paper fully and found the distinctive scratch of a man.

Z-

I couldn’t stay. Sorry.

-N

I frowned, folding and tucking the note into my breast pocket. I stood, crossing the dewy path quickly to get to the greenhouse.

No jagged shards of glass, only one gaping hole and a chunk of pane that rose like a dagger up the center of the window frame. The hole wasn't big enough for a man to crawl out...but a kid? Maybe.

I tried the door of the greenhouse, surprised when it opened freely. This door was usually locked all night long, only to be opened by Zahara and her skeleton key with dawn’s early light. That must mean that someone had been here before me this morning, cleaning up the glass and what else?

My eyes scanned the uneven stone floor for clues. Buckets and pots stacked ten high lined one wall, a worn table with rusted tools and nails and buckets of hooks and screws decorated the top. The interior was tidy, aside from a few earthenware pots that’d toppled beneath the broken window. I tipped it to look inside, broken shards clattering at the bottom of the red clay base.

“Hm, what would Watson say?” I mused aloud, smiling as I thought of Nate over my shoulder, teasing me while I investigated. “I wonder where that secret doorway is anyway.” I worked my way along the table, eyes on the corner where a small pot-belly stove sat alongside a chest holding spare lily pots and hanging planters that were wrought with iron filigree that matched the gargoyles sitting atop the house.

“Someone had some creepy taste.” I was just about to push the chest to the side in search of the fabled secret doorway when a whistle came from behind my shoulders. I stood, spinning instantly and sneaking quietly to the door, hoping to catch whoever was about to catch me first.

All life in the garden had halted, only the soft scrape of a limp along stone and the absent-minded whistle.

Walton Usher came around the pathway then, eyes wide when he found me staring back at him.

“What do you want?” Thick black spittle caked at the corner of his mouth.

“I was just looking for a pot to plant a seed,” I lied.

He shook his head, coming at me. His greasy, gray hair fell just to his shoulders but was tucked behind his ears like he’d slicked it back with his own spit every day for the last sixty years.

I sucked in a sickened breath when he moved close enough that I could smell him. Sour mash and tobacco came to mind before I slipped away and turned my head, covering my lips and mouth as I fought the tears in my eyes.

I wondered if Nate was forced to sleep at all within proximity of him, and hoped for his sake he’d been sneaking up to the greenhouse every night, at least then he could sleep under the stars.

And then my blood ran cold.

What if Nate had been sleeping in the greenhouse and Mother had found him out here when she’d come to unlock it early this morning?

Maybe they’d had a fight and that explained the tipped pots and broken window.

I turned, about to ask Walton what’d happened to the window when I found him wrapping his hand in a dirty towel and grasping the singular shard remaining that was lodged in the iron pane.

He twisted then heaved, breaking the last piece off. He held it up to the light. “Old lead glass doesn't break easy. Hate to think who was on the other side of this fight.”

I gulped, Nate’s note ringing in my ears.

It was then I knew he’d really left.

I dipped my gaze to my toes, tears stinging my eyelids. If he’d asked, I’d have gone with him.

The next little lily broke its back, and the third little lily's petals turned black.

Terror trickled through my bloodstream.

What had Mother meant by her dark rhymes?

And how much had she blended fiction with reality?

PAST

Zara - Summer 1964

“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.”

I repeated the last lines of Mother’s assigned reading this week. A brutal short story about the evil that runs like a crack through every heart. Nate had promised to read it with me, and now that I was finished, he was the only person I wanted to discuss its darkness with.

I closed the yellowed pages, tossing the collection of short stories on the desk table before standing to stretch.

It’d been all day since I’d discovered Nate’s note at the fountain, the tilt of the sun in the sky neared early evening and since I hadn’t eaten, my stomach was rumbling. I paused at the window, slipping Nate’s folded note out from my breast pocket and reading it one more time. I ran my fingers over the words, imaging him writing them in a hurried rush last night.

Had he known when we’d met at the cliff that he wouldn’t be here today?

I gulped, tucking the note away in my nightstand drawer and leaving the room.

I hoped at least Nate would be safe, find a roof to sleep under, and maybe not forget me so quickly.

At the top of the stairs, I smelled homemade chicken noodle soup. My stomach turned, the desire for something simple like a bologna sandwich was overwhelming. Mother said often that broth had all the ingredients required to sustain life, but from the look of the twins, I would disagree. We’d hardly been at Usher three months and their papery skin was so translucent their blue veins grossed me out when I looked at them.

If they attended a normal school, someone would notice that they weren’t healthy, but they didn’t go to school. They lived at Usher House, now officially designated