Vivian Divine Is Dead Read Online Free

in with a piece of evidence gripped in a set of tweezers.
    “I’ll just go to the police,” I continue. “They’ll protect me from this psycho, whoever it is.”
    Mary’s eyes are choked with tears. They remind me of my cappuccino’s curdled milk, thick swaths of liquid clinging to the surface.
    “Did you hear me?” I say to Mary, raising my voice. “The police will protect me.”
    “I heard you,” Mary says softly. “Your mother said the same thing.”

Chapter Four
    F EAR FLOODS INTO ME LIKE ice water.
    Tears drip down Mary’s cheeks and pool on the floor beneath her. That scares me even more, because in the two years of being side by side every second of every day, I’ve never seen her cry, not even at Mom’s funeral. “I’m sorry,” she says. “You were—you are—too young to know this.”
    “Is it about Mom’s . . . passing?” I definitely can’t say the M word. Murder means something heavier, like she could have been in pain or tortured, or worse.
    “Before your mom . . . passed,” Mary says, “she got a package in the mail.”
    “A package?” Oh God. I don’t want to know where this is going. “What was in the package?”
    “A DVD. It was just like this one. It showed . . . how she died,” Mary says. “Then three days later, she was found dead.”
    This can’t be happening. “What did she do?” I ask.
    “She went to the police. They said they’d protect her. But a few hours later she disappeared.”
    “And then?” Don’t tell me. I know the end to this story.
    “And then she was murdered.”
    Murdered. I still see Mom’s white shawl stiff with blood, her shining blond curls splayed across the floor.
    “Why didn’t you tell me all this before?” Anger at Mary is filling me now, and anger feels good, better than fear.
    “There’s a lot you weren’t told,” Mary says. “We had to keep secrets. For your own protection.”
    “Protection against who?”
    “The ones that killed your mother.”
     
    Mom’s death started with a secret. A secret behind closed doors, hidden in angry words and fights sharp as swords.
    I saw the secrets behind Mom’s eyes. So did the press. They were waiting for the leak, but secrets don’t leak; they explode.
    My first understanding of secrets came in the form of a death threat, delivered a month before she disappeared. A crinkled piece of paper, hidden from me by my mom’s shaking hands. And it said: “I’m coming for the girl.”
    When I asked Mom about it, she started shaking so violently Dad had to lead her away. But before they left, I saw his eyes. He didn’t know any more than I did. Mom wouldn’t hide anything from us—would she?
    Then for a month, we didn’t get another letter, so I thought it was over.
    I was wrong.
    The day before Mom disappeared, our mailbox was stuffed with letters. There must have been two hundred, shoved into every inch of the box. The postal service said they didn’t deliver them, and the police were even less helpful. They couldn’t do anything because the letters came from nowhere. From nobody. Mom wouldn’t let me read them, but I saw that there was the same date on every letter. September 25. The day I was born.
     
    My body is heavy and numb. I curl into a ball and bury myself in my covers, bundling the pink feather duvet over my head. “What do you think I should do?” I ask Mary from under the covers.
    Under the thick material, her voice sounds muffled and wavy. “Hide somewhere safe for a few days. If nobody can find you, nobody can hurt you,” she says. “That’ll give us time to figure out who’s after you.”
    “But what if we don’t figure it out?”
    “What else do you suggest we do?” Mary asks. “Go to the police? That’s what your mother did. And look where she ended up.”
    Like I need a reminder. “But I can’t disappear in the middle of shooting! Not during this movie!” It’s true: the twisted love story between the murderous, demented Don Juan and his kidnapped