Read Online House of Dark Shadows by Robert Liparulo - Free Book Online Page A

without me.
    I’m meeting the district superintendent at the school. School starts next Monday, and I haven’t even toured the place.”
    Mom laughed. “Not to mention that you haven’t met the teachers, set up your office, reviewed the school calendar—”
    â€œI know, I know,” Dad said. He shrugged. “When they hired me I told them I didn’t have time to do everything. They said not to worry about it.” He smiled. “Getting someone of my caliber is worth a little disorganization. That’s what they said.”
    Mom aaahhh ’ed. “How sweet.”
    â€œSo what, you want us to look for intruders alone ?” Xander asked.
    â€œYou’ll be fine,” he said, glancing at his watch again. He stood. “I have to run by the motel, take a shower, and change.”
    He grabbed the rest of his sandwich and hurried out.
    9 The sun had crested in the sky and started its descent toward the horizon by the time Xander and David brought their inspection to the second floor.
    â€œThis is great,” David said. “We wanted to search the house anyway. Now we got Dad’s help, and we don’t have to sneak around. I hope he’s back before we get to the attic. I don’t want to go up there alone.”
    â€œHey! You’re not alone.”
    â€œYou know what I mean.”
    â€œLet’s start with the far bedrooms and work our way back,” Xander suggested.
    As they walked the corridor, their heads swiveled back and forth to look into each room they passed. Toria’s bedroom had been swept and the windows washed. It was amazing how much light came in now that the filth was off the glass. It would be even better when they finally got to cleaning the outside.
    â€œShaping up,” David said.
    They passed the pink room and the bedroom that was going to be theirs—the corner room with the tower. Duh. They hadn’t had a chance to do anything with it yet. It was as gloomy as ever.
    â€œLot left to do,” Xander said.
    â€œYeah, but we haven’t found any graves or coffins with vampires or anything like that. I was thinking the basement would be the place for those things.”
    They stopped outside the open door of the last room on the other side of the hall. Looking back, Xander was struck by how long the corridor really was. It continued beyond the foyer and grand staircase. All told, it was fifty feet, maybe longer. Even then, the far end of the hall bent into another corridor that led only to what Mom and Dad called “the servants’ quarters.”
    Xander would have called it a second master bedroom, because it had a walk-in closet and a private bathroom. He thought servants should also have their own kitchenette so they had privacy on their days off; that room didn’t have a kitchenette. Still, he hoped it was inhabitable by the time Dae was ready for his own room-Xander would love to claim the “servants’ quarters”
    for himself.
    He said, “I don’t know. I get the feeling there’s more to this house than it’s showing us.”
    They went into the bedroom and flipped on their flashlights.
    More of the same: dust, old furniture, peeling wallpaper.
    â€œHey, look at this,” Xander said. His light had captured a framed picture on a nightstand. The photograph was faded, almost white, the faces indistinct. But Xander could tell it had once been a color portrait of a family: a man and woman, a little girl whose size would have made her three or four years old, and a blond-haired boy, a few years older.
    â€œIs that the family who was murdered?” David whispered almost reverently.
    â€œI bet.” He was thinking how the fading of the photo- graph made them look like ghosts. In The Picture of Dorian Gray , a painting of a man changed to reflect the ravages of his evil deeds instead of reflecting the person himself. It seemed to Xander this picture instead continued