In the Arms of Stone Angels - By Jordan Dane Page 0,48

seeing her dead would make that horror go away.

But she was gone. And that left me feeling hollow inside.

I had never considered her a friend, but no one deserved to die like that. I took a deep breath to clear my head. And to get out of the dumps, I kept reading and found a strange article published almost a month after Heather’s death. It grabbed my attention even though it was on the back page—because it showed White Bird’s booking photo.

I stared at that photo for a long time, looking for any hint of the boy I knew. His eyes were half-shut. And with his messed-up long hair, he looked like a drugged-out homeless guy. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve sworn the photo wasn’t of my friend.

And yet it was.

In the article, a reporter had written a short piece on a local theft that had been linked to White Bird. Joe “Spirit Walker” Sunne was a Shaman and Euchee tribal elder. He claimed that he’d been robbed a week before the murder. His burglary report would barely hit the papers on a slow news day, but after the police ran fingerprints taken from the scene, a hit came back on White Bird. According to the paper, the police had solid proof that he had stolen tools from Sunne.

I got angry when I read this. White Bird stealing? That made no sense. But the weirdest part was that I could reject the idea that he could steal, yet when it came to killing Heather, I had serious doubts about his innocence. I couldn’t get past seeing him over her body and holding that knife. The gory image had horrified me. It still did. It had branded my psyche. And I couldn’t shake that sight, not enough to keep an open mind.

What kind of a friend was I?

I scribbled Sunne’s name in my spiral notebook. And I looked him up in the online White Pages and printed off directions on how to find him. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that Joe Sunne was a revered member of the Euchee tribe. White Bird wouldn’t have stolen from the man unless it had been for a very good reason—or a very big misunderstanding.

And I had to know which.

I had a hunch that talking to the man face-to-face was the next step I’d come to the library to find. I had to piece together a puzzle that had been a long time in the making and resurfaced on the day I touched White Bird at the hospital. Those days that White Bird had kept secret from me—the week before Heather was killed—were a good place to start.

Next Afternoon

I hadn’t seen Derek all day. Even though I had no idea what it meant for him to be missing in action, I hoped that he’d gotten bored with watching me over the past several days with nothing happening. He could have learned not to be so obvious or gotten smarter about keeping an eye on me, but that idea made me laugh. Using the words learned and smarter to describe Derek sounded like a ridiculous waste of my valuable worry time.

Still, I had to admit that not knowing where he was made me tense. I thought about telling Mom about him stalking me, but that would only stir things up with the sheriff. And I liked the peace and quiet. I needed it.

With Mom keeping me real busy, that helped get my mind off my stalker. She had painters coming the next day and had me clearing space for them to work. We moved furniture away from the walls and covered things with sheets to protect the important stuff from paint splatter.

But the hardest thing we had to do didn’t require muscle.

By late afternoon, Mom was clearing the last boxes of my grandmother’s clothes. By the end of the week, not much of Grams would remain. And with everything I had on my mind, I made room for more sorrow in my heart. The pain of losing my grandmother gripped me hard.

When Mom told me what she had planned, I helped her get everything done even though I hated it. I got real quiet. I knew the day would come when closets had to be cleaned and clutter had to be tossed, but boxing up a lifetime of memories was hard to do.

And until today, I’d been so wrapped up in myself that I’d forgotten how hard this would be on Mom, finally