Violet Eyes Read Online Free Page A

grumbled. Never mind that he hadn’t weeded the gardens around his slum of a house ever before. Didn’t matter. He was starting a new life here.
    Again.
    Billy stepped into the small garage and pulled on a pair of canvass gloves that lay on the shelf in the corner, next to the dusty hand shovel. Then he thumbed the garage door opener and squinted at the bright light of the afternoon sun that streamed in.
    He didn’t feel like talking anymore about watching things crawl out of Mark’s mouth as his friend lay dying under the spray of a pesticide as deadly as the creatures it was meant to kill. A deadly pesticide that Billy had unknowingly unleashed on his friends. Billy shook the image of Mark’s face from his head and walked towards the lip of the garage with his gardening tools. He didn’t care if he found worms or water bugs or millipedes or beetles in the overgrown soil near his beat-up bungalow. But if he found any spiders…
    He wasn’t doing any more interviews today.

Chapter Three
    Tuesday, May 7. 5:14 p.m.
    Someone was living across the street again. The front window blinds were open, and the front lawn was cut. Rachel had noticed that something was different about the place this morning when she’d taken her early morning jog before work. (Okay, it was more of a fast walk, but she was working up to a jog, right?)
    Tonight when she pulled into her drive, for the first time since she’d been in Passanattee, she could actually see into the front room of the house across the street. It was as if someone had taken the place out of storage. It looked different. You could almost smell the stale air sifting away. It had clearly been getting lost in the weeds for a long time. Until now.
    She got out of her car and stood there staring at it for a minute, wondering who had moved in. So far she hadn’t really met many of her neighbors, though she’d seen them racing out of their driveways to wherever. The lady next door— Agnes? —had stopped by on the day that Rachel had moved in to welcome her, but that was the only time they’d talked. And Rachel had been a bit distracted at the time.
    “Mom? Hurry! I have to show you something.”
    Rachel pulled her eyes away from the neighbor’s house and caught the smile of her son, hanging out of the front door. With one hand, she slapped at an insect that buzzed in the air near her shoulder. With the other, she pointed at the front door.
    “Close the screen,” she warned, “you’ll let the bugs in.”
    Then she locked the car and followed her son inside.
     
     
    Something twined around her ankles as soon as Rachel stepped into the house. She felt the fur and warmth of the animal before it let out a sound. “What the hell?” she blurted out, as she leapt backwards.
    “Isn’t he cute?” Eric asked. “Tracie Wilkins said I could keep him. Her mom said they can’t keep the whole litter and she wants them to go to someone she knows, not some stranger.”
    Rachel opened her mouth to say, No, he absolutely couldn’t just spring a dachshund on her without warning, and then she had another thought that made her almost as angry. “What were you doing at Tracie Wilkins’s house in the first place?” she asked. “You are supposed to come straight home after school, you know that.”
    Eric’s smile fell. “But I did!” he said. “Tracie brought him here . We talked today at recess and she said she could bring him over after school so we could meet him.”
    Eric crouched down on the carpet with his hands out, and the dog scooted his way, its hindquarters shimmying back and forth like the back end of a slinky. “Tracie’s mom said we could keep him overnight, just to see how we liked him. Can’t we just do that?”
    The boy looked up at her with eyes that were impossible to deny.
    “We don’t have any dog food or a water dish or anything,” Rachel tried to argue, but before she was even finished, her son was pointing to a silver dish on the tile of the kitchen