Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls by Mary Downing Hahn

done.
    But he's digressing from the one detail that bothers him. His brother. He hasn't come out of his room since yesterday morning. He's holed up in there, listening to rock-and-roll on a colored music station. He's terrified they'll be arrested.
    He's told the little coward that all he has to do is act normal and nothing will happen. But the kid's a wreck. He's going to have to keep his eye on him.
    The doorbell rings. It's the two detectives.
Dum de dum dum.
Like Sergeant Friday and his partner. Just the facts, sir.
    He's very polite to the detectives, he says what's expected. It's so sad, tragic, girls that young and so on. He tells them he didn't know them, didn't go to the party. He didn't hear anything yesterday morning. He doesn't own a gun, doesn't even know how to shoot one. They don't ask to speak to his brother. Or his parents, who are at work.
    They thank him, give him a card with a phone number to call in case he remembers anything later. Yeah, sure, he'll definitely call them.
    He watches the detectives walk down the street, probably heading for the Luccis' house to talk to Paul. Paul won't mention seeing him at the party. No one will. It was dark, the girls were the only ones he spoke to. When they laughed at him, scorned him, mocked him, he left. Quietly. The way he'd come, the way he'd entered the woods yesterday.
    He's a fader. He disappears into shadows. He wears mental camouflage. He's Mister Death, the man you meet on the stairs. The man who isn't there.

Night Thoughts
Saturday, June 16
Nora
    I' M alone in my room. In bed even though it's only nine thirty and not quite dark. I want to sleep but I can't.
    Everyone else is downstairs watching Sid Caesar. I can hear canned laughter. My parents and Billy laugh too. How can they laugh? How can anyone? I wish they'd shut up. It's all I can do not to open my door and scream at them.
    I keep thinking of a poem I read in English class. I don't know why I liked it so much, but I copied the whole thing in my diary so I could read it whenever I wanted to. Maybe I knew someday I'd need that poem.
    It's one of the Lucy poems by William Wordsworth, an English Romantic poet who lived in the Lake District, a place I would very much like to see someday if I live long enough to get there. It's supposed to be very beautiful. You can visit the cottage where he lived with his sister Dorothy, and you can take long hikes on the fells like he used to. Of course he's dead now, but unlike Shelley and Keats, he lived to be old and boring. I know all this because I wrote a report on him in tenth grade.
    He wrote the poem while he was young, before he got boring. I can say it by heart now:
    Â 
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seem'd a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
    Â 
    That's what it's like to be dead. No motion, no force, you neither speak nor see, you're rolled round, rolled round, you're rolled round and round forever on earth's diurnal course. Not a word about God or heaven, just rocks and stones and trees. Rocks and stones and trees.
    Before I got in bed tonight, I tried to draw a picture of Lucy in her grave, but as usual when I'm drawing, I couldn't get what I saw in my head on paper. I tore it up because I was scared Mom would find it and think I was crazy. What kind of person draws dead girls?
    The worst thing is—what I can't stop thinking about—the blood. Billy told me about it. The police found blood on the path, their blood in the dust and in the grass where Buddy dragged them. It was in the paper, which I still won't read.
    Ellie and I and who knows who else stepped in their blood and never noticed. We walked in it, it was on our shoes, and we didn't know. When I got my sneakers back, I threw them away. Mom found them in the trash and asked why I'd thrown them out, she'd just