The Rivers Run Dry Read Online Free

mouth but my aunt barreled forward.
    â€œIf you’re worried about the necklace matching your outfit, just put it in your purse. You can touch the stones every now and then if you feel threatened. You won’t believe the change that comes over you.”
    â€œThis is nuts,” I said.
    â€œRaleigh Ann!” my mother said. “Don’t be rude.”
    My aunt placed her hands on ample hips, her batiked silk tunic seeming to quiver.
    â€œI’m telling you, Nadine, this city is the Grand Central Station of the spirit world. Every spirit comes through Seattle before going on to other dimensions. And some of them never leave.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?” I said.
    My mother threw me a harsh look, then smiled at Charlotte as though she were offering a free vacuum. “Go on, Charlotte.”
    â€œYou remember when I moved to Seattle, I was as thin as Raleigh. Now look at me. I’m as wide as the Chesapeake and it’s all because this city has a spirit of hunger. Food, food, it’s all about food here. If you don’t protect yourself, Nadine, you’ll find twenty pounds landing on your hips by Christmas.”
    â€œAunt Charlotte, this is—”
    â€œRaleigh,” my mother warned.
    Holding up the plump hand, she severed my mother’s scold. “You just watch, Raleigh. You won’t be able to stop eating.”
    â€œI don’t want to stop eating.”
    â€œThat’s what you think.”
    The last time I saw my aunt was at my father’s funeral, four years earlier. She was an exotic character, the aunt who sent me rocks for birthdays and Christmas, and she had flown into Richmond with the smell of patchouli and rain and grief. She had been sensitive enough, or sufficiently devastated, that she did not raise any New Age ideas then, but now I recalled how she gripped a specimen of pink tourmaline during my father’s funeral. At the time, my mind numbed with pain, I only saw a mineral the color of antique roses and a bosomy woman with tear-streaked cheeks whose pudgy fingers rubbed a rock with an agitation I mistook for misery. Her brother, my father, was dead, murdered in an alley near our house.
    I saw pink tourmaline, not spiritual kryptonite.
    â€œSpeaking of hunger, what’s for dinner?” I said, attempting to change the subject.
    â€œHow does tofu tetrazzini sound?” my mother said.
    â€œYou’re asking me?”
    â€œIt sounds great!” my aunt said.
    My mother shooed the cats off the table, and I walked upstairs to change clothes and search my closet for the stash of candy bars. My bedroom, barely used, was a shrine to my late father. Every morning before work, I locked the door with a brass skeleton key, hoping to shield my mother from the walls that held copies of his law degree from the University of Virginia, the official appointment to the state’s Superior Court, the handwritten note from the governor, vowing every resource to solve a crime that to this day remained unsolved. Even the bookcases held his boyhood favorites— Treasure Island , Pilgrim’s Progress —with prep school tennis trophies and blue ribbons for shag dancing contests.
    I did not believe in ghosts, except one who was holy, but there was no mistaking that in this bedroom my father felt close, palpable. The feeling comforted and haunted me at the same time.
    When my cell phone rang, I pulled the closet door behind me, leaving an inch open for air, and lifted the phone off my belt clip.
    â€œHarmon?” My supervisor, Allen McLeod.
    â€œYes, sir.”
    He paused. “Jack sent you to Issaquah today. That right?”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œGirl missing?”
    â€œCorrect.”
    â€œGo talk to the parents. Start making nice. We’re in a bad game of hot tomato. The parents called a senator in Washington. He called our ASAC who called me. He wants to know what we were doing about her