Read Online The Book of Eleanor by Nat Burns - Free Book Online

what the future held. They deserved that.
    I guess I wasn’t fooling Father Sephria that afternoon. He stayed for the entire spelling class, even taking over the signing for Emilio and Carter so I didn’t have to sign as I taught—a good thing as Sally was acting up and wouldn’t take her turn defining the words from Tuesday. I didn’t give her the usual time-out because I felt certain all of them were picking up on the tension filtering through all the teachers in the school. I set them on the task of reading over their next unit while Father Sephria and I retreated to the back of the room.
    “So what did she say?” he asked in his heavily accented English. His deep brown eyes searched my face intently.
    “Nothing changed,” I replied. “She said it was a done deal. We have till the first of April.”
    “ Dios mío ,” he said, crossing himself. “What will we do?”
    “Close the school. We have no choice.”
    “There has to be a church that will allow us to use it,” he said with conviction.
    “Every weekday? I don’t know about that. And what about access for the wheelchairs and Freddy’s hospital bed? You know how old the churches are around here.”
    He shook a finger at me. “No bad allowed!” he scolded.
    I had to smile at him. “You’re right, Padre, no pessimism allowed. Something good will happen.”
    “Yes, I will pray. God will see us through.”
    I glanced back at the class, at the kids with their heads bent over their textbooks. “We’ll all pray…while we pack.”
    His disapproving tsk followed me when I returned to my students.

Grey
     
    A quick glance at the green glowing face on my alarm clock told me it was three in the morning. I lay very still, trying to discern what sound had awakened me. There it was again, a low growl. I rose slowly and peered along the hall that led into the living room. In the dim light coming from the condominium streetlights, I saw Oscar Marie crouched low, her ears back, facing the doorway that led into the Bookmark.
    I started to call to her, then experienced a sudden, clutching fear. Suppose someone had succeeded in breaking in again? I had reset the alarm system with another new code, but suppose it had been circumvented somehow?
    I picked up a flannel shirt from next to the bed and shrugged into it while I unplugged my cell phone so I could carry it with me. I stepped carefully across the bedroom and into the carpeted hallway. I would not call the Port Isabel Police Department again until I knew something definite. I’d felt so foolish yesterday when they’d found no evidence of a break-in. I could tell by their actions that they thought me a loopy, hysterical female, overreacting and not even remembering what I had done or not done.
    Yet I knew without a doubt that I had not stacked the books that way. They had been neatly placed in vertical alignment. The policeman who responded first had caused me to briefly doubt myself, but after he and the second officer left, I retraced my steps in my mind and knew what I had done. But no door locks had been breached, and the windows were all still securely locked from the inside.
    Approaching the kitchen, I silently slid a butcher knife from the knife block and approached the door into the front room. Oscar Marie meowed her concern to me, but I ignored her and quietly turned the knob with my left hand, taking care that my cell phone didn’t knock against it.
     The door squealed when it opened, so I reached in right away and flipped on all three toggles for the house lights. Sudden, blinding brightness from the ceiling lights made me squint my eyes into tight slits, but I still searched the room for an intruder.
    I saw no one. Oscar Marie raced past me and paused just past the first coffee counter to arch her back and hiss. Her fur had bristled up all over her body. My first thought was that one of Maddy’s dogs had somehow found its way back here, and then I thought of a raccoon, or a rat. There simply