The Accident Season Read Online Free Page A

drop. The middle section of the bridge hits the water and stops, caught between two rocks. Water whooshes over my legs to my waist, but I’m still standing, leaning against the rail in the middle of the river.
    I’m shaking all over, but not from the cold.
I’m okay,
I tell myself sharply.
I’m okay
. I breathe deeply until I can move again. Carefully, hand over hand, legs heavy in the water, I make my way across the rest of the fallen bridge to the other side of the river.
    I climb up onto the opposite bank. Still breathless, Iedge toward the copse of trees where I thought I caught a glimpse of Elsie. Moss and bits of twig stick to my boots. They squelch as I walk. I part a row of branches and peer into the little clearing behind them. Everything is dark here, shadowed by trees. The light is watery and weird, full of whispers.
    “Hello?” I feel like that girl in the horror films, the one who makes you scream at the screen, telling her to turn and run away. My heart does a little flutter dance. “Elsie?”
    I think I hear a tiny noise coming from a clump of bushes at the far side of the clearing. Everything else is strangely silent. I can’t hear the leaves crunch or the river flow behind me.
    “Hello?” I say again. I tiptoe toward the bushes. The leaves rustle as I approach.
    “Elsie?” I reach forward and part the branches quickly, like ripping off a Band-Aid. There’s nothing there. Nothing except a small box squirreled away to the back of the bushes. I get down on my hands and knees and stick my head in under them. The branches catch in my hair. I blow at the leaves to get them out of my way, and that’s when I see the mousetrap nestled in a pile of dusty moss.
    For a minute I scan the ground, worried that I’ve gotten too close to a rodent’s nest, but then I notice what’s on top of the trap and it’s not (thankfully) a dead mouse, nor is it a piece of perfectly holey cheese like in
Tom and Jerry
cartoons. What it is, is a doll.
    It looks like it’s been made of cardboard and wire and cloth, like the Guatemalan worry dolls my mother keeps in a little pouch hanging from the rearview mirror in her car. Only this one looks exactly like Elsie. It’s got mousy brown woolen hair and pale cloth-skin and it’s wearing a tartan skirt that looks like our school uniform and a shapeless red sweater of the kind Elsie always seems to wear outside of school. It even has the Peter Pan collar of a tiny shirt coming up from underneath the sweater’s neck. I back away and stand up slowly.
    “Elsie?” I call. “Elsie!” No one answers. A little breeze whistles through the clearing and my legs break into goose bumps underneath my wet layers. Or at least I tell myself it is the cold and the wet, and not the little cardboard doll set out like the bait in a trap.

3
    W hen I get home, Sam’s and Alice’s bags aren’t in a pile in the hall covered with hats and gloves and autumn leaves, so I assume they’re either still in school or on their way home. I dump my own bag next to the stairs and take off my still-damp boots.
    In the living room, my mother is curled up on the couch like a cat, chewing on a lock of long purple hair and sketching in a notebook. She barely looks up when I come in.
    “Hi, Mom.” I perch on the side of the couch and knock on my mother’s boots with my knuckles. They are big green walking boots that look like they’ve trekked through oceans.
    She shuts her notebook with a snap and smiles at me. “Hi, darling.” Her voice is rough. There’s a strange aura of sugary sadness about her this evening. She’s still wearing her coat.
    “Are you okay?” I ask. It’s unlike her not to insist on driving us home from school if she’s not working.
    “The presses broke just after lunch,” she says. “Both of them, at the same time. Figures.” My mother is an artist. When she’s working on prints or etchings, she uses a little studio in the middle of Galway City that she rents with some of