Aces Read Online Free

Like puberty or something. I thought about getting her back into school, or at least helping to get her high-school equivalency. On the one hand I was surprised I hadn’t received a summons from juvenile court. On the other it was just another example of how removed Soelle was from everyday life.
    I had asked Soelle what she wanted to do with her life, and she told me her first priority was to find those last two aces. I told Soelle we’d have to work on that, but until then maybe she’d like to help me rake the leaves.
    I told her to get started while I went down to the hardware store to buy some paper leaf bags. As I was coming out of the store, I happened to look across the street at the people lounging around in Orchard Park. They were all looking up at the sky. I went over to see what was going on. I tried to follow their collective stare, but I couldn’t see anything. Then I saw it, something small and dark floating high above the trees. It looked like a black balloon. Everyone was talking in low, excited voices, some of them pointing. An old man holding a bag of bread crumbs he had been using to feed the pigeons was shaking his head and saying, “It ain’t right. No sir, it ain’t right at all.”
    Whatever it was, it started to come down closer to the ground. It bounced back up, then came down again, lower this time, and I could make out what it was.
    Soelle.
    She was wearing a black dress and black shoes (part of her witch’s wardrobe, I assumed). As I watched her descend lower, one of the shoes slipped off her foot and fell into the park fountain with a splash.
    “Heads up!” she called down in a giggling voice.
    “Soelle!” I shouted. “Come down from there!”
    I felt absurd saying those words. Like I was only asking her to come down off the roof.
    “Are you kidding?” she hollered back. “Do you know how long it took me to get up here? I’ve been working on this for weeks!”
    “Get down right
now
!”
    “Don’t be such a drag.” She swung around in a lazy turn and started coming down lower. She brushed the top of one of the tall elms and called out: “Oh, wow!”
    “Be careful!”
    She came floating down to the ground, looking like a gothy version of Mary Poppins (
sans
umbrella). The people in the park ran away, some of them screaming.
    “This can only end well,” I said, watching them scatter.
    Soelle waved a dismissive hand. “They’re just jealous,” she said. “Forget them. Look what I found at the top of that tree!”
    She passed it to me.
    The ace of spades.
    * * *
    The van showed up the day after the levitation incident.
    I knew something was coming. There was a tension in the air, the kind that reminded me of the wet-battery smell before a powerful thunderstorm.
    I was in Soelle’s room changing her sheets. Not that there was any sign she actually slept in her bed those days. I was just going through the motions of a normal life. I was putting on the pillowcases and staring at the spider that built a web outside Soelle’s window every spring. The web it had made this year was bizarre to say the least. It was all over the place, for one. It was coming apart in places and in others the webbing had been spun into strange, almost geometric shapes.
    I was watching the spider running madly back and forth when the van pulled up: a white van with no markings on it except a plus sign on the side. Sort of like the Red Cross only black.
    A man and a woman got out, both dressed conservatively—the man in a dark suit, the woman in a skirt and jacket ensemble. They looked like Jehovah’s Witnesses. The man was carrying a briefcase, but I didn’t think there were copies of
The Watchtower
inside.
    I reached the front door just as they were knocking on it.
    “Hello,” the man said. “My name is Waldo Rand. This is my partner, Leah.” He motioned to the woman behind him without taking his eyes off me. “May we speak with you?”
    “About what?”
    “You have a sister.” It