The Darkest Corners New Excerpt

• • • There was never going to be a funeral for my father, even if he’d died on enough notice. There’s no money to pay for one, and I’m not sure who would have shown up if we’d held it in the prison chapel. Wanda? The other inmates? It’s mortifying. Everyone who mattered to my father—and it was a short list, trust me—is long gone. So I’d booked my return trip to Orlando for tomorrow night.

That was before I knew my sister is back. Was back. Who knows where she is now—she’s had a twelve-hour head start to get the hell out of Pennsylvania.

What I can’t figure out is, how did Jos know my father was dying? Glenn Lowell wasn’t even her biological dad. Our mother left Joslin’s father when Joslin was two; all we’d ever heard about him was that he lived in Louisiana. He and my mother had never gotten married. I never had the nerve to ask whether or not the scar on Joslin’s chin had anything to do with the reason my mother left him.

Jos called my father Daddy, and there was never any mention of the Louisiana man. My dad called us both his babies, and Jos cried like I did when he went to jail for three counts of armed robbery and attempted capital murder.

I doubt that Jos found out he was dying from our mother, since I haven’t heard from her in almost ten years. Gram hasn’t heard from her in twice that. I’d think maybe it was Maggie who got in touch with Jos—Maggie always had an almost mystical quality of being connected to people, always knowing what everyone was up to. But she was just as surprised as I was to find out that Joslin had been to the prison last night.

And Maggie never really liked my sister anyway.

Callie and I had been friends since pre-K, but until we turned eight, Joslin was always “That sister of yours, Tessa,” said with a disapproving sidelong glance. That June, Lori Cawley came to Fayette to spend the summer with the Greenwoods. Jos was about to be a senior in high school. Lori had just finished her first year at college in Philadelphia. Maggie tried to introduce Lori to girls her own age, but she met my sister when Jos dropped me off at the house, and that was that. Joslin and Lori brought Callie and

me to the pool almost every day when my sister wasn’t working; they’d bend their heads together over copies of Cosmo and talk about the things they did with boys, and if Callie and I overheard, they’d buy our silence with giant jawbreakers from the ice cream parlor.

It was also the first summer my mother let me stay over at a friend’s house. The first time I slept at the Greenwoods’, Callie and I watched Mulan twice because we didn’t want to go to sleep, our mouths white from the jawbreakers. I was having so much fun, I didn’t even miss having my sister in the bed with me, like I did on the nights when she snuck out to meet her boyfriend, Danny.

The last time I stayed at the Greenwoods’ was the night Lori Cawley disappeared. In Fayette, we’d heard rumors of a serial killer abducting girls from truck stops along I-70. They’d found three bodies in the previous two years. All runaways, drug addicts. Girls of the night.

Girls like Lori didn’t have anything to worry about. In Fayette, we were safe from the Monster, who stalked the outskirts of town in search of the next troubled, desperate girl to accept a ride from him.

That was what we thought until the police found Lori’s body in a wooded area off the interstate a day after she went missing.

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