Read Online Spirit by Graham Masterton - Free Book Online Page B

ran to father’s library and picked up the telephone. Silence. The telephone was dead. Frantically, she jiggled the receiver-rest up and down, and screamed, ‘
Hallo! Hallo! Help! Help us! Emergency! Hallo! Hallo
!’ but the phone stayed dead. Too much snow. The lines between Sherman and Boardman’s Bridge must have come down, the same way they had last year, and the year before.
    Elizabeth ran back to the kitchen, just in time to meet father and Mrs Patrick, swiftly and grimly carrying mommy into the house.
    â€˜Will she be all right?’ begged Elizabeth, as they laid her on the living-room couch in front of the fire. ‘I tried to call for the doctor but the phone won’t work.’
    â€˜Just watch her, keep her warm, make sure she’s breathing,’ father told Mrs Patrick, ignoring Elizabeth altogether. ‘I’ll go bring Doctor Ferris myself.’
    â€˜Yes, sir,’ said Mrs Patrick, sorrowfully. She chafed mommy’s hands to warm them. ‘Oh, Mr Buchanan, this is a tragedy, and no mistake. What a tragedy, God help us.’
    There was nothing Elizabeth could do but stand beside the couch and watch mommy twitch and mutter, her eyeballs roaming underneath her closed eyelids like caged bears. Laura came in and took hold of her hand.
    â€˜O Holy Mother, smile on us now when we need You,’ said Mrs Patrick. ‘You were a mother, too, remember, O blessed Mary. You were a mother, too.’
    Elizabeth squeezed Laura’s hand tight. ‘Don’t worry,’ she whispered. ‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ she said; eventhough she had a terrible feeling that she had probably told one of the biggest lies of her life.

2
Heart of Ice
    â€˜Her kiss was colder than ice. It went to his heart, although
that was half-frozen already. He thought he should die.’

 
    Â 
Four
    On the day that would have been Peggy’s eighth birthday, 15 June 1943, Elizabeth and Laura took their best friend Molly Albee to the cemetery; and they laid fresh white carnations on her grave. They stood with their heads bowed and their eyes squeezed shut, praying for Peggy’s soul, and trying as hard as they could to remember what Peggy had really looked like.
    It was a hot, treacly afternoon. With her eyes shut, Elizabeth could hear the leaves rustling and the hoarse warbling of vireos in the high maples that shaded the cemetery’s southern side.
    She could hear a freight train whistling, on the line that ran between New Milford and Danbury.
    She also heard a voice whisper, ‘
Lizzie
,’ quite close to her ear.
    She opened her eyes, and turned around. Laura and Molly were both standing on the other side of the grave, and there was nobody else in sight – nobody close enough to have whispered in her ear like that. She frowned, and shaded her eyes against the sun. The shingle pathway was deserted, except for a gardener who was patiently edging the grass, and he was more than two hundred feet away. On the far side of the cemetery, where it was still wooded, she thought she saw something flickering between the trees, but it was probably a rabbit, or a wood-pigeon.
    Above Peggy’s grave, a white angel with a sweet, sad face looked down where Peggy lay. The birds had perched on the angel’s head, and her cheeks were streaked with black tears. Elizabeth could never decide if this was disgusting or mystical, or a bit of both.
    They walked back through the cemetery and out of the squeaking iron gate. A young bespectacled man with sprigged-up chestnut hair was changing the lettering on the church notice-board. He waved to them, and called, ‘Good afternoon, ladies!’ His name was Dick Bracewaite and they all loved him. The Reverend Earwaker had been ailing lately, with a prostate condition that had proved resistant both to ice-packs and to prayer. Dick Bracewaite had been sent from St Eugene’s in Hartford to stand in for him, and