Good as Gone: A dark and gripping thriller with a shocking twist. Amy Gentry

      AMY GENTRY is a book reviewer for the Chicago Tribune whose work has also appeared in Salon, LA Review of Books, and Best Food Writing 2014.

      GOOD AS GONE is her first novel.

      Good As Gone

      Amy Gentry

       For Curtis, the best living human

       Table of Contents

       Cover

       About the Author

       Title Page

       Dedication

Prologue

1

2

3

Julie

4

       Gretchen

       5

       Vi

       6

       Violet

       7

       Starr

       8

       The New Girl

       9

       Karen

       10

       Charlotte

       11

       Petes

       12

       Baby

       13

       She

       14

       Esther

       15

       Julie

       16

       Acknowledgments

       Copyright

Prologue

      Jane woke up and whispered, “Julie?”

      The room yawned around her. After two years of sleeping alone in her own bedroom in the new house, Jane no longer dreamed of the ceiling fan dropping onto the bed and chopping her up. The spiders, too, had vanished from the shadows; ten-year-olds don’t need to have the corners checked before bedtime. Only occasionally, when something woke her in the middle of the night, the silence around her ached for Julie’s soft breathing. In the old house, she used to hoist one foot over the top bunk railing and giggle until Julie said, Shhh, Janie, go back to sleep. Now, she shut her eyes tightly before they could drift toward the dark seams where the walls and ceiling met.

      The next noise definitely came from Julie’s room.

      Jane pulled back the covers and slid her bare feet down to the carpet. In the old house, a braided rug slipped over the smooth wooden floor when she got out of bed. Now her feet barely made a sound on thick carpet as she padded to the door and peered down the dark hallway. A faint rectangle of lighter darkness hovered at the end — a closed door.

      They rarely slept with doors closed; Janie’s room got too hot, Julie’s too cold. Mom grumbled about the air circulation in two-story houses, but Mom and Dad’s room downstairs on the first floor was always shut at night, because they were adults. Now Julie was too, or wanted to be. Ever since her thirteenth birthday, she seemed to be practicing for adulthood all the time, brushing her hair slowly in front of the bathroom mirror as if rehearsing for some secret play, sitting at her desk to write in her diary instead of flopping on the bed stomach-first, like Jane. And closing her bedroom door.

      At the end of the hall, the pale rectangle shuddered, a crack of darkness opening up around one side. Julie’s bedroom door receded inward, four large fingers hooked around its edge.

      Before she had time to think, Jane ducked into her closet, crouched down, and pulled the door shut behind her. The fingers — they were too high up on the door to belong to Julie, too large to belong to her mother. They didn’t belong to her father either, but she didn’t know how she knew they didn’t, and that was the most unsettling thing of all.

      A tiny, sickening click reminded her that the closet door never stayed closed for long. She threw her hands forward, but the door was already floating slowly open.

      Jane squeezed her eyes shut as a soft tread started down the hallway.

      When she opened them a moment later, the closet door had come to rest three inches from the door frame. The slice of hallway visible from her hiding place almost glowed against the closet’s deeper darkness; she could see every fiber in the beige carpet, every ripple in the wall paint, and, hanging on the wall, half of a framed studio portrait in which long-ago Jane sat on long-ago Julie’s lap, wearing a baby dress with a sailboat on it. The sailboat shook on its embroidered waves. Everything else was shaking too. The steps continued toward Jane’s room.

      The noisy floorboard in the middle of the hall moaned. The owner of the hand was now halfway to her room. Could he hear the creak in her ears each time her thundering heart shook the little boat? Jane resisted