Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

at once cleared a path for Lori to move away and displayed her strength to the cursing women. “Go!” the lady marshal snapped at Lori, shoving the woman shooting video in the chest, ordering her to move away. The phone flew out of her hand. For a second, Lori thought it was going in the water, but the Polynesian woman snatched it out of midair. “Don’t want to lose the evidence of your asshole-ness,” she said.

Two boys about Joseph’s age ran up behind the lady marshal. One clenched his fist, the other, a little blond boy, held a big piece of driftwood like a sword and glared at the men on the ground like he wasn’t beyond bashing them in the head. His frown looked remarkably like the marshal’s. A woman in a ponytail rushed in a moment later. She grabbed both little boys and dragged them away by their shoulders. Lori took her own son’s hand and followed her.

Of all the people gathered on the rocky beach, the woman in the ponytail looked the most ferocious – a mother bear protecting her cubs.

Chapter 19

Anchorage

Constance’s eyes grew wide at the sound of all the chimes. Even the doorbell in the Liptons’ house sounded rich. It was one of those long, drawn-out things like you’d hear at a church or from a fancy grandfather clock. The girls weren’t supposed to have anyone else over. Three was the limit. Audrey’s mom had said so before she went to catch her flight and left them to their own devices.

Audrey looked at her watch – an Omega, expensive for a high school girl, but not unheard of in south Anchorage. “Right on time,” she said. She was sixteen and knew things.

Evelyn Brant moved her dark eyebrows up and down, then shivered in anticipation. “This is going to be so awesome.”

Constance smiled and bounced a clenched fist on her knee, hoping she looked as excited to be there as the girls expected her to be.

The doorbell chimed again and Audrey got up from her spot on the floor, careful not to spill her glass of wine. Her pajama pants were pushed up above her calves – she was volleyball captain at South High, so she had great calves. Cotton balls separated freshly painted toes, and she did an exaggerated heel walk, shaking her butt like there were boys in the room as she went to answer the door.

All three girls’ parents knew where they were – but had no idea of their plans. What Constance’s mom called getting into trouble and what Audrey Lipton’s mom called getting into trouble were miles apart. Ms. Lipton didn’t want her daughter to do anything that would get her arrested. Constance was sure her mom would think not going to jail was a pretty low bar.

Constance’s mother often warned her to stay away from Mountain View or Spenard – parroting her Uncle Arliss with dire warnings of midnight murders, gang violence, and… insert ominously heavy music… drugs. What a joke. There were as many drugs to be had in the neighborhoods around Huffman and O’Malley as there were in Mountain View or midtown. Everything was just more expensive.

The midnight murder part – well, that was true about those parts of town, so Constance was happy to cool her heels at her new friend Audrey Lipton’s bajillion-dollar house, surrounded by woods but still in south Anchorage. And anyway, for all Constance knew, her Uncle Arliss had installed some government tracking app on her cell phone. It was usually such a pain to have a law enforcement uncle, but Evelyn Brant had told her parents she was staying over with Audrey and Constance – playing the “her uncle is a US marshal” card to get them to sign off on the deal. She left out the part about Audrey’s mom flying out of the country.

Audrey’s mom was some kind of bigwig with an international shipping company. She was divorced and traveled a lot, mistakenly believing that because sixteen-year-old Audrey was an honor student at South High School, she could manage a couple of days at home alone without getting into trouble. No more than two friends over at once. That was the rule. It made Constance wonder if Audrey’s mom had ever been a kid herself. Did she really believe that three teenage girls left to their own devices for two days and two nights over spring break could possibly keep from getting into trouble?

Audrey’s mom smoked weed herself once in a while, to relax, so it wasn’t like she was going to come home and smell anything that would make her freak out. She was more worried about her expensive booze and locked the cabinet with a combination that Audrey happened to know was her own birthday.

In truth, Constance didn’t know what was supposed to happen that night, except that Audrey said they were going to “partay,” which to Audrey usually meant smoking weed and snitching some of her mom’s wine. At least, that’s what Constance had heard. She’d never been invited to Audrey’s house before and she didn’t know Evelyn except from geometry class.

Audrey was gone long enough for Evelyn to tell an entire story about her mom’s stepdad, who killed some guy who owed him money and now he was doing twenty years in Spring Creek down in Seward. “Hey, maybe your uncle knows him,” she said, as if Arliss knew every murderer in the Alaska prison system.

“Maybe so,” Constance said, hoping she sounded friendly instead of condescending.

Audrey came back with a small brown paper bag, rolled tight and wrapped with a rubber band. It was about the size of a fat cigar. She dropped it on the quilt next to her pizza plate and flopped down beside it, careful not to smudge her toes or jostle her wineglass.

“For laters,” she said, pushing the paper bag aside.

“That was way easier than I thought it would be,” Evelyn said, nodding at the paper bag.

Audrey took a bite of pizza.