A Sudden Silence Read Online Free

while now. Long enough, I'd say."
    His eyes were the toughest I'd ever looked into. "OK. Well, sure. I'll just go on inside."
    I backed away, feeling guilty for no reason whatsoever. Guilty and hopeless.

    It was bad, bad, bad all over again when Gran and Grandpa and Aunt Lila came. "Fred's so sorry he couldn't get away," Aunt Lila told Mom. "He's devastated."
    "It's all right, Lila. It doesn't matter."
    Grandma hugged me tight and said my name over and over. Grandpa shook my hand. He had cut his face shaving and there was a smear of dried blood on his chin. He looked very old.
    Grandpa and Bry have always been close. Ever since Bry was little Grandpa has sent him stuff to make—plane models, and ship models when he was in elementary school, and more complicated things when he got older. Grandpa would get a model for himself at the same time, and they'd make them together, thousands of miles apart. Little notes came and went in the mail: discussions of their problems, the relative merits of glues, how B118 would not fit into C118, no way, not unless you trimmed it first, and Grandpa would definitely write to the manufacturer. They'd probably been working simultaneously on whatever that was on Bry's desk. I wished I'd swept all those bits and pieces of paper into the drawer before Grandpa could see them.
    When we got home I did that fast. Then, while they were picking at the salad Mom and I'd fixed for lunch, I slipped away to get the shoe.
    The beach swarmed with people and there were lots of cars parked along both sides of the road, the way it always is on Sundays. I studied them. White cars, silver, blue, most of them small. There was one big old dark green surfer wagon that looked homemade. I decided I'd probably be checking out the rear ends of cars as long as I lived, or till the day I found the right one, whichever came first.
    Three kids on the beach side pointed across the highway. They'd be saying, "Over there's where it happened. It threw the guy right up in the air." Something like that. Kids are gruesome. Bry and I were. The mothers of those kids would have told them, "See? See what happened to that poor boy? Now maybe you'll know I'm not being paranoid when I tell you to stay off the road and use the tunnel. Don't ever, ever, ever again try running across the highway."
    I swung around and that was when I saw the guy in the black Windbreaker. He was standing behind the ranch wire, looking at the spot where Bry had been hit, and the anger fizzed up inside me again. Not
his
brother. Not someone he loved. Just another geek.
    "Hey!" I yelled. "What are you staring at?"
    His hands jerked off the wire as if he'd been electrocuted.
    "Why don't you step over and get a closer look?"
    The guy turned quickly and began half running. Maybe I sounded like a madman. I felt like one, all right. There was some kind of emblem on the back of his black Windbreaker, a circle with airplane propellers or something inside. That's what I aimed for as I picked up a handful of pebbles and flung them at his retreating back. They missed by a mile.
    "Have a good day!" I yelled. He was falling all over himself trying to get into his beige Honda, and I flung another handful of pebbles as it hurtled past me. It took a lot of deep breathing before my shaking stopped, before I could make myself move toward the back of the guard's office.
    Chris Sanchez, who works the gates, was out checking the ID of someone coming into the park. I dropped the shoe into the brown paper sack I'd tucked inside my shirt. Already I'd decided not to put it with Bry's things. What if Mom saw it? Nobody that I knew of had questioned the missing shoe. There had been too many other things to worry about. Back home I put it on the shelf at the back of my closet, out of sight, and then I went to the phone in Mom and Dad's room and called the police. I held for Officer Valle, and when she came to the phone I told her in a low voice about the shoe, and about how I thought it