Read Online Under the Harrow: by Flynn Berry - Free Book Online Page B

happens, but I am sure he wanted to strike me. “I didn’t tell you when to stop,” I say, and he watches me. “How did you know which car was hers?”
    “I’d just done a job at her house.”
    “Rachel told me you were obsessed with her.”
    He puts a note on the bar and leaves. I can’t tell if it was the right thing to say. She never mentioned him.

16
    M ORETTI CALLS. “ We’re done with the house. Let me give you the number of a cleaning agency.”
    “You don’t handle that?”
    “No.”
    “Do you pay for it?”
    “No.”
    “We don’t have to clean it. If it will compromise evidence—”
    “We have what we need,” he says, and I take down the number. The agency is called Combe Cleaners. You wouldn’t know their specialty unless you asked. “You’ll want to have the cleaners in before you go back,” he says. “We can arrange for people to be at the house when you arrive, light a fire, make sure the boiler is on. Some families like to have a priest bless the house. Should I arrange anything like that?”
    “What people?”
    “Friends of yours and Rachel’s.”
    “Oh.” I thought he meant strangers, or guards, which I would have preferred. “No, thank you.”
     • • • 
    I decide not to wait for the cleaners.
    A few yellow leaves hang from the elms on either side of Rachel’s house. Some noise flushes the birds from the trees and they wheel into the sky. The air smells of water and mud and hay and the smokiness that courses over the countryside in November. Across the road, Rachel’s neighbor rides in her paddock on the same dappled horse as on the day Rachel was killed.
    Smoke rises from the chimney at the professor’s house. Two cars are parked in its open barn. Wind flattens the thorn trees on top of the ridge and bends the column of smoke until it is almost horizontal.
    When I open the door, I think someone else is inside. I have a sense of the pressure changing, a floorboard lowering. I wait on the step, listening, but I don’t hear another creak, or a door close.
    I can’t do this. The blood staining the floors and the walls has turned black. My ears start to ring. But she might have left something inside about Keith, or someone following her, or her friend from the hospital.
    I raise the thermostat, and there is a roar as the boiler comes on in the basement. My whole body twitches at the sound. I look at the banister. The dog’s lead didn’t cause any damage, and in the row of four turned wooden posts the one he hanged from doesn’t look different from the others, except for a few stains. I think, nonsensically, of the houses on Priory Walk in Chelsea, the identical white decoys on either side.
    I check the ceiling, and it does have a long crack across it. Keith was telling the truth about that much. The radiators start to hiss as I cross the living room. Anything important will probably be in the files under her desk, but I decide to start downstairs. I move through the rooms, looking for anything out of order, anything the police might have missed.
    All the surfaces are covered with a thin layer of black carbon. I run my finger through it and sniff, but it doesn’t smell like anything. The police also left ice in the sink in the kitchen, though other than that the room is unchanged. The pot on the hob. The slate bowl of chestnuts.
    Her ax is propped against the back door. The sight of it prompts a burst of hope, as though she has a chance now.
    I imagine coming in with a fire lit, and the living room filled with people, and someone cooking dinner in the kitchen, and the lamps burning against the dreck. It wouldn’t have made it easier. I imagine a priest walking through the rooms, reading a psalm, but the only lines that come to mind are from a poem.
And I have asked to be / Where no storms come.
    Through the front window, I look across the valley until I think I find the hole cut in the trees. He might have come in the house on one of the days he watched her. She