Read Online Widow's Tears by Susan Wittig Albert - Free Book Online

all lived together in a little crooked house.”
    Except that this crooked house wasn’t little. It was huge, a Victorian mansion, and in terrible need of repair and repainting. The somber brown walls had been scoured by the wind and bleached by the sun, and the chipped slates on the precipitous roofs—there were many roofs, all at strange angles—glinted dully, like broken teeth. A widow’s walk, bizarre and alien in this land-locked place, extended the length of the central spineof the house, its railings broken and hanging. Oddly, the house was raised above the ground on tall piers, as if to avoid flooding—certainly an unlikely event on this hill. A pair of equally unlikely lions flanked the steps up to the gallery at the front of the house, glaring at each other with stony suspicion. The yard, weedy and badly mowed, was surrounded by an unkempt border of gnarled oleanders and hollies interspersed with straggly date palms.
    A rusty iron fence was wrapped around the house and yard, its sections leaning crazily, first one way, then another, some of its posts scattered like a litter of loose iron spears across the ground. From this enclosure, there were only two ways in and out: a double iron gate in front (centered with a large and ornate letter
B
) and a smaller gate in back, half-hidden in an overgrown clump of chaste trees. From the back gate, a graveled path edged with iris meandered haphazardly past a well-tended kitchen garden, then forked. One branch continued on to a small fenced plot at the edge of a wood, the other went to a barn, a double garage, and a small frame house—the caretaker’s cottage, probably. Behind that were a kitchen garden, a chicken coop and fenced yard, and several sheds.
    Ruby took a deep breath, then another. Nothing much had changed in the years since her first visit, except that the house, still out of place and uncompromising, had grown older and more worn and tired. Seen from this angle, it was even more maimed and misshapen than she had remembered, as though it had been copied from a construction plan but hurriedly and imprecisely, or perhaps not even from a plan but from memory—a faulty memory, flawed. Parts were joined at incongruous and inharmonious angles. Some parts were larger than they should be. Others were smaller, so that the whole thing seemed wretchedly out of alignment. It wasn’t evil or malicious or malevolent, like Hill House. It was just…just crooked. Crooked and sad and out of place and
wrong
, in exactly the sameway it had been wrong all those years ago, when ten-year-old Ruby had seen it for the very first time.
    The first time? Ruby closed her eyes, then opened them again, feeling the same prickling sensation of déjà vu that she had felt during that childhood visit, only stronger now—much stronger and more unsettling. She wondered with something close to panic whether that first visit had really been the first, or whether she had known the house from some previous time, some other place, when it had imprinted itself on her imagination so powerfully that it could never be forgotten.
    But now, as then, what struck Ruby with the force almost of a blow was not just the wrongness of the physical structure and its outlandish unsuitability to the place where it had been built, or even the unsettling sense of déjà vu. It was its heart-wrenching
sadness
that brought quick tears to her eyes and made her instinctively turn away, as if to escape an embrace. For she felt exactly as she had felt that long-ago July afternoon when she and Claire had come here to visit: that the house, saturated in its own bitter sorrow, was waiting for her. It wanted to snatch her, clutch her, drown her in its devastating grief, as if—
    She pulled in a steadying breath and shoved the thought away, but her hand was trembling and her fingers were icy. She turned the key, but the ignition only clicked, and the engine didn’t turn