Page 18 of Girl in the Water
The night bugs were coming out to feast. She’d waited all day. She hadn’t left. And now that the old dream was reborn in her heart, she couldn’t.
So she left the docks and snuck back to Senhor Finch’s house to beg him not to send her away, to promise him that she’d never open the door again to any strange man. It was the only thing she’d done differently, so she was certain that was why Senhor Finch was mad at her. Even if he’d said he wasn’t mad at her. At Rosa’s, if a man got mad, it was always the girl’s fault,always. Rosa had beaten that into them.
Daniela quietly crept into the house, stopped right inside the door.Oh.
What’s that?
She squinted to see better. The furniture had been thrown around and now lay scattered on the floor, broken. Her heart had been pounding already, but now it pounded harder.
Senhor Finch was even angrier than she’d thought. She hesitated. But then she put her bag down and softly padded toward the bedroom, ready to suffer even a hard beating—shewouldstand it if she had to—just as long as she could stay.
She didn’t make it halfway when, as she passed the table, she saw Senhor Finch in the kitchen.
He lay on the floor, a dark pool under him, his eyes staring at the ceiling. One of his ears had been cut off, resting now down by his knee on the floor. And his hands looked… Someone had shoved slivers of bamboo under his fingernails.
Daniela’s stomach roiled.
Senhor Finch was dead.
