Read Online Quiet Neighbors by Catriona McPherson - Free Book Online Page B

phone and was scrolling through her pictures.
    â€œHere we go,” she said. “This is the only way I can do it.” She held the phone out and showed a photograph of the room taken from exactly the same spot where she was standing. “Three new ones,” she said, comparing the image on the screen with the view before her. She slipped her phone back into her cardigan pocket and poked open a Safeway bag halfway up the front of the pile.
    â€œ Casual Vacancy , Bake Off , Fifty Shades , Picoult,” she said. “This is your typical Supermarket Sadie. Save a fortune if they’d just put their name down at the library. I’ll just bob up and check Lowell’s got these already before I nab them, though. I know where to look.”
    Jude nodded dumbly. She pulled at a thin, yellow carrier that had bulged out of place at floor level like a lumbar disc. Jilly Cooper’s Riders was just visible inside. If it had been discarded after one reading by another impulse buyer that meant there was roughly thirty years’ worth of mouldering paperbacks in here. And she had actually thought she was winning .
    â€œI’ll leave the Picoult.” Maureen had returned. “But he’s got the rest. Well, not Fifty Shades . Ask him why not if you want a laugh sometime.” She had rechecked her phone and was reaching up to a second bag. “Now then, what do we have here? Oh, this is different. Yellow hardbacks. I know better than to touch them.”
    â€œGollancz edition,” said Jude. When she’d first started in the library, the long stretch of yellow Gollancz Michael Innes was something to navigate by when she was shelving. Like the soft pink block of Mazo de la Roche and the fat spines of the Susan Howatch blockbusters. All gone now.
    â€œAnd … ” said Maureen, stretching to the final new bag, “ … comics. I’ll tell the lads up at Kapow! Lowell can’t be fashed with comics.”
    Jude barely heard her. She had walked away to Coasters and Key Rings. “I’m not here, I’m not here,” she said.
    â€œThat’s me sorted, hen,” said Maureen, coming to join her with a short stack of books under one arm. “Do you want to get the door after me?”
    Jude nodded and smiled, over her slump already. It was all good. That’s what the happy people were saying these days to anyone who’d listen. It’s all good. Yes, there was an extra week’s work in there; a fortnight’s maybe. But that meant an extra fortnight’s pay and an extra fortnight’s—she tried to stop the thought before it was finished, but it came anyway—safety.
    â€œI’ll let you out the back if it’s easier,” she said to Maureen. “This weather! Are you parked out that way?”
    â€œParked?” Maureen said. “There’s no parking out there. It’s a garden.”
    â€œBut didn’t you come round?” said Jude. “I thought I saw you.”
    â€œRound where?” said Maureen. “There’s nowhere to … you thought you saw what ?”
    â€œDoesn’t matter,” said Jude. She walked briskly and opened the front door, then watched as Maureen scuttled up the street with the paperbacks held tight inside her cardi. Then she locked the door again and wandered slowly back through to the Boudoir. It had been a laundry room once, or whatever a utility room had been called in those days, with a door to the drying green.
    Jude opened it as quietly as she could and thought she saw, was almost sure she saw, through the high stalks of old hollyhocks and the lowest branches of the apple tree, that same flitting movement again.
    She knew she heard the sound; the squeal that was more like a groan. But this time it ended with a sharp smack . Jude made sure the laundry room door was propped open, misusing a tattered copy of Highland Verse Vol II that lay on the floor, and picked her way