The Last Dream Keeper Read Online Free

swing—”
    Lyse’s throat tightened. She gritted her teeth until her jaw ached and the urge to sob disappeared. Lizbeth, in her infinite patience, waited for Lyse to continue.
    â€œSorry about that,” Lyse went on, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her hoodie. “You know the swing, right?”
    Lizbeth nodded, her long braid slapping against her back. Something about the girl’s eyes, the way they shone in the sunlight, pierced Lyse’s cracked heart and all her hard fought composure melted away. First the swing and now the innocent look of pity on Lizbeth’s face . . . it broke Lyse open. She felt hot tears burning the corners of her eyes, but she refused to wipe them away.
    â€œI killed someone last night,” she whispered, the need to confide her sin greater than she’d realized. “I mean, at least, I
think
I did . . . and now I’m not so sure.”
    She found no recrimination in Lizbeth’s eyes. Instead, the teenager reached out and wrapped her arms around Lyse’s shoulders, hugging her tight. They stood like that for a long time, the sun cresting over their heads as it lit up the whole of the L.A. River basin. From their vantage point high in the Echo Park hills, they did not see the water meander slowly down its man-made channel, or the 5 freeway come to life with the flow of morning rush-hour traffic.
    *   *   *
    Lyse was on edge as she made coffee in the stovetop espresso maker. She sat down at the round oak kitchen table to drink it and felt like thousands of pairs of eyes were watching her, spying on her comings and goings, so they could file away information about her every move. Maybe some giant computer somewhere was collecting all the info for further tabulation, turning her life into a series of ones and zeroes—which sounded rather comforting if it got rid of all those pesky emotions like guilt.
    Guilt. She was tortured by it. The image of her uncle David crushed and bleeding underneath the Lady of the Lake statue filled her mind. The way his fingers twitched, bloody and pale white in the moonlight; the sound of stone driving flesh and bone into asphalt, compressing a living being into mush. His scream had been the worst. Like an earwig tickling hereardrum, it wiggled around inside the labyrinth of her ear canal, repeating itself over and over again.
    She fought to push the image out of her brain, to banish it to some nether region of her cerebral cortex where she could pretend it didn’t exist—even though the whole strange night was, of course, burned into her gray matter for eternity. She had hoped that telling Lizbeth would make her feel better, but it had only done the opposite: She felt crushed underneath the weight of her own anxiety.
    Because even though there wasn’t a body and the statue was still intact, Lyse
knew
she didn’t dream her uncle’s death.
    The ringing phone cut into these morbid thoughts, throwing her a lifeline. Someone out in the real world was thinking of her—or, at the very least, was thinking of Eleanora—and wanted to connect.
    Lyse got up from the table, the scrape of her chair competing with the jangle of the telephone. She grasped the receiver of the avocado-green corded telephone that hung on the wall by the refrigerator and slid it from its hanging cradle.
    The jarring noise stopped midring.
    â€œHello?”
    It was strange to stand there, an adult in the house where she’d spent her formative years. The last time she’d really used this phone, she’d hidden in the cupboard with the door closed, the cord wrapped around her finger as she’d tried to get some privacy. That was what it was like being a teenager: You felt constantly harassed, were always looking for an escape (especially from your own head), and you didn’t want
anyone
knowing your business. The adult version of Lyse was an entirely different person from the