Read Online The Wishing Thread by Lisa Van Allen - Free Book Online Page A

clothbound tome that her family had used for record keeping since 1867. The Great Book in the Hall no longer occupied its original location, but the moniker had stuck—in part because it didn’t sound as impressive to call the thing
the Great Book in the Spare Bedroom
or
the Great Book on Aubrey’s Dresser
. Like the old Dutch Bibles of farmsteads past, the Stitchery’s sacred book moved from room to room over the centuries, but it was never far from a window. If ever a fire were to break out within the Stitchery’s dry timber frame, the Great Book could be tossed out to relative safety.
    After recording Ruth’s name, a description of her sacrifice, and her address—which Aubrey hadn’t needed to ask for simply because
everyone
in Tarrytown knew where Ruth TenEckye lived—she plucked up Ruth’s pin from the table beside her and carried it reverently, cupped in two hands like a firefly, up the kinked tower stairs. The moment Mariah died, Aubrey had become the Stitchery’s official guardian. It was hers now: her burden, her responsibility, her joy. All she could do was hope.
    She placed Ruth’s pumpkin pin among all the other relics. Then she went downstairs to her bed and fell on it belly-first, too exhausted to take off her clothes.
    “Do you think she’s happy?” Meggie asked. She and Bitty were stretched out side by side on Meggie’s old quilt, their feet hanging off the end of the bed. It was sometime in the middle of the night, but Meggie wasn’t tired. She was worried about Aubrey. There were troubling elements of Aubrey’s lifestyle that she hadn’t quite fully noticed when she’d left the Stitchery four years ago.
    “I don’t see how she could be happy,” Bitty said. “She lives like a hermit.”
    “She’s got a friend. Jeanette seemed cool.”
    “She’s
knows
people,” Bitty said. “But she doesn’t have a social life. Nothing but her job at the library, and the Stitchery, and the hedgehog. She’s cooped up in here all the time. And now that Mariah’s gone, it’s only going to get worse.”
    “So what do you think she wants?”
    “I don’t know.” Bitty pulled the long end of her ponytail in front of her face and squinted at the ends. “Maybe she thinks it doesn’t matter what she wants.”
    “I guess I can understand what that’s like,” Meggie said. And she paused, but her sister was lost in thought and didn’t ask what she meant. “If she stays here …”
    “I know,” Bitty said. “It’s dangerous.”
    They fell quiet, and Meggie knew they were both thinking of their mother.
    “We have to respect her choices,” Bitty said. “We can’t save her if she doesn’t want us to.”
    “Still,” Meggie said. “We have to try.”
    From the Great Book in the Hall:
Where does the urge to create come from? Children will doodle a smiley face on a friend’s shoe. Mothers will braid their daughters’ hair. Fathers will teach their sons to use a jigsaw, or paintbrush, or awl. The impulse to create is a gift and a blessing. But take care that it does not become corrupted. There is a line between passion and obsession, between seeing and thinking you see
.

It was no stretch of imagination for the people of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow to believe in magic. From the beginning, they always had. Native people gathered around the big Hokohongus tree for decades, even centuries, during council meetings. The enslaved Kongolese men and women of Philipse Manor held that the mucky waters of the Pocantico were a boundary line between this world and the next. Even the old burgher Frederick Philipse, staunchly Dutch Reformed, had seen his share of the unbelievable.
    As legend goes, he’d just started construction on the Old Dutch Church—his slaves quarrying rock and mixing mortar—when a freshet flooded his millpond. The dam crumbled and water sluiced through the vale. Philipse pulled the plug on the church’s construction to stop up the pond, and when the water was behaving