Read Online Disappearance at Devil's Rock by Paul Tremblay - Free Book Online Page A

there are pages and pages of huge breasts and asses, giant erect penises and scrotums, and dark triangular patches of hair, and all manner and derivation of frenzied coupling. Kate’s face fills with blood and heat. She shuts the notebook and quickly throws it at the milk crate. She misses and it whooshes and claps against the floor. She looks around the room, wishing that Tommy would walk in and catch her, and yell at her, and she’d make fun of the pervy pictures and threaten to tell Mom. She waits, her breathing so heavy, but he doesn’t walk into his room. She picks up the notebook and looks at the naked pictures again, quickly, before filing the yellow notebook in its Tommy-designated place.
    Kate leaves his desk and walks over to his bureau. Even though she wants to, going through his drawers feels like she’d really be crossing a line that can’t be uncrossed. And given the pictures in his notebook, she’s a little afraid of what she might find, though she can’t say what it is exactly she’s afraid of finding. The top of his bureau is fair game,though, as it’s all out in the open. One corner is stacked with baseball hats, in the middle is an assortment of superhero figurines and mini-Minecraft axes and swords, and there’s a circular metal tin that once held holiday tea bags that’s a catch-all for pocket-sized stuff; movie stubs he’s saved (who knows why), key chains he’s never used, a compass with the needle stuck in one place, loose change, small bills. She sifts through the tin and finds a plastic sandwich bag. Inside the sealed bag are two coins.
    Tommy went through a coin collecting phase. One summer Mom had inexplicably given both of them a shoebox full of old coins their father had collected. The two of them reverently picked through the box and made a ledger detailing coin types together. Kate lost interest soon after the initial, found-buried-treasure rush. Tommy kept it going and added to the collection on his own, but Kate could’ve sworn he’d stopped collecting a few years ago, certainly before he went to middle school.
    Kate opens the bag and slides the coins out onto her palm. One is a penny that’s old (1956) but isn’t a wheat back. What makes the penny remarkable is a large crack in Lincoln’s head that runs horizontally; starting above his eyebrow and going clean through the back of his head. Or maybe it’s a matter of perspective and the crack starts in the back of his head and runs through to the front, and it’s a weird penny version of the Lincoln getting shot in the head (Kate learned about his assassination in third grade). She runs her thumb over the crack and doesn’t feel any raised edges.
    The second coin is the size of a nickel, and its tails side features Jefferson’s stately Monticello. There’s no Thomas Jefferson profile on the heads side of the coin. Instead, there’s a blank profile, a silhouette of a face: no features, everything perfectly smoothed over except the profile’s outline. Hovering above this profile is a single eye, like theone on the back of a dollar bill. Kate digs through Tommy’s tin for a regular nickel and compares the two. “In God We Trust” and “Liberty” and the year the nickel was pressed is gone, wiped away. The profile of the man on the coin is different from Jefferson as well; it’s not just Jefferson’s face with the details removed. It’s someone else’s silhouetted profile. The sharp nose and chin has been replaced with rounder versions and his long ponytail swapped out for a short, tight haircut. It’s definitely a profile of someone more modern. She imagines Tommy using the coin as a joke and trying to convince people that the new nickel features Justin Timberlake or someone equally random. Kate thinks she should know to whom this mysterious profile belongs. Whoever it is, the floating eye above makes it weird