Annie's Song Read Online Free Page A

straighten his shirt. “Where will I go? What will I do?”
    “I don’t care.”
    “But I—” Douglas broke off and gave a shaky laugh. “Come on, Alex. Give me a chance to make things right. Everybody gets a second chance.”
    “You’re out of chances.”
    Slack-jawed, Douglas just stood there gaping. “For Christ’s sake. Take away my allowance for a month! Confine me to the house! Do anything you want, but don’t kick me out.”
    “Those are punishments for children, Douglas,” Alex said tiredly. “You didn’t take a club to some farmer’s pumpkin patch this time or set fire to an outbuilding.” In a twinkling, Alex recalled the many pranks his brother had perpetrated over the years, most of them harmless but always with an underlying viciousness he had refused to recognize. Kerosene-soaked sacks of shit placed on people’s front porches and set aflame so the unsuspecting inhabitants would run outside to stomp out the fire.
    Outhouses moved after dark to sit directly behind their sewage pits so visitors would step off into the putrid sludge. Harmless pranks, Alex had always told himself, but in truth, he had known differently.
    “The damage you wrought today can’t be recompensed with money, Douglas. Can’t you comprehend that?”
    The muscles around his brother’s mouth began to twitch. “But it can be fixed.” He lifted his hands in supplication. Yesterday, Alex might have pitied him, but now he felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. “To make things right, I’ll even marry the little idiot, Alex. Just say the word.”
    “Marry her? I wouldn’t wish that fate on a dog, let alone a retarded girl.”
    With that, Alex spun and left the tack room. As he gained the alley, he paused only long enough to say,
    “If you’re not out of here before I return from the Trimbles’ house, I’ll hand you over to the law myself.”
    “The Trimbles’ house? Why in hell are you going there?’’
    Why, indeed. “To try and make amends,” Alex said softly, “though God only knows how. Being a Montgomery doesn’t give you license to destroy other people’s lives, Douglas. You’re finished in these parts. Clear out before they set the hounds on you.”

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    The lee of the high porch steps protecting her from the chilly night breeze, Annie huddled behind the holly bush, her back pressed firmly against the brick foundation of the house. Safe here. No one could sneak up on her from behind. Hands couldn’t grab her unexpectedly. The only way anyone could approach her was from the front.
    She tried to see through scalding tears as she scrubbed compulsively at her legs with the hem of her white nightgown. Dirty, sticky, ugly. She couldn’t bear to have anyone look at her, not her mother with that aching sadness in her eyes, or her father with that burning anger. She had done nothing wrong, nothing. Yet the way they stared at her made her feel as though she had. Here, in the darkness, she didn’t have to endure the accusing expressions on their faces. She took a shuddering breath and held it trapped at the base of her throat to prevent herself from sobbing.
    The branches of the holly bush swayed in the breeze. The muscles in Annie’s arms and back twitched and knotted with relentless tension. Moonlight frosted the front yard with silver, lending the shadows eerie outlines and making the harmless seem threatening. When the airless pounding inside her head finally forced her to breathe, she did so with a frantic gulp to swallow back any sound she might accidentally make. Someone might hear, and then Papa would come with the strap to make her be quiet. Her whole body already ached. She didn’t think she could bear to get a licking, not tonight.
    Even the air around Annie seemed filled with menace. Though she knew it was silly, she kept looking up, half afraid the bad man who had hurt her might swoop down from out of nowhere. That was how