Читать книгу The Path Through the Trees - Peggy Dymond Leavey - Страница 7

Three

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Norah awoke to find the temperature of the room she had been assigned in Great-aunt Caroline’s house more frigid than ever. She slid off the bed, pulling the scratchy blanket around her. She dug her slippers out of a side pocket on the suitcase and shoved her feet into them.

Opening the door to the hall, Norah was surprised to discover it was much warmer than the bedroom. Along with the heat, the unexpected aroma of cooking food wafted up the stairs. There was something comforting about the smell of food cooking, and it cheered her a little. Or perhaps it was the nap that made her feel more optimistic. By now, Aunt Caroline might be used to the idea of having a teenaged houseguest. They just needed to give each other a second chance.

Every door along the hall, as well as the one to the right of the stairs, was closed. No wonder the hallway was so dark. A window at the far end looked down on a narrow sideyard, a wooden fence lined with the stalks of dead hollyhocks and beyond, a forest of naked trees. Creepy, Norah decided.

She exchanged the blanket for a towel from her room and found the bathroom behind one of the closed doors. Norah let the water run into the sink until it was finally warm. Holding her hands under it, she splashed a little over her face.

The fine braids that held the sides of her straight, brown hair back behind her ears had come undone, and she rebraided them in front of the mirror, clipping the ends together at the back of her head. She took a moment to stare in the glass at her pale face with its sharp features, the nose she thought too long, the brown eyes a little too close together.

“Well, here you are, Norah Bingham,” she said to her reflection. “Whether you like it or not.”


“I can’t believe you’re doing this, Mom,” she had said earlier that afternoon, as she and Ginny stood in the lineup at gate seven in Union Station, waiting for the train to points east. “You don’t even know this woman, and now you’re sending your only child off to stay with her, all by herself!”

“Come on, Norah.” Ginny gave her a good-natured nudge. “This is your father’s aunt. I know enough about her that I’m confident you’ll be well looked after. I’m sure she’s a lovely person.”

“You think everybody’s a lovely person,” Norah muttered. “Even that guy in the next apartment, who looks to me like a hit man for the Mafia.”

Ginny smiled nervously at the woman sitting on her suitcase ahead of them in the line, listening to every word. “Oh, Norah, what an imagination! Try to make the best of this little setback, dear. We’re still going to have a holiday in the country.”


Leaving the door to the bathroom open, Norah descended the stairs to the ground floor. She peeked into the room to the right of the front entrance. It contained several pieces of leather furniture, looking creased and comfortable. There was even a television set in one corner. “Well, this is better,” she said, under her breath.

Across the hall was a formal living room, its windows covered with heavy draperies. The needlepoint seatcovers on several side chairs provided the only relief to the drab colour scheme.

An arch connected the living room to the dining room. Light leaked from under a door to the right. Norah knew by the smells coming from that room that it must be the kitchen. Her stomach rolled with hunger.

The dining room windows looked out over a backyard bordered by a hedge of overgrown cedar trees. Norah crossed the room to look outside.

In the far corner of the yard, and leaning slightly to one side, was a dilapidated gazebo. Halfway along the hedge, an opening had been left to the forest behind it.

Night was falling beyond the cedars, but the backyard itself was well lit. To Norah’s surprise, she saw that the yard was practically filled with birdfeeders. They hung from the branches of every tree, from the clothesline, the gazebo and from numerous hooks driven here and there into the ground. There were dozens of them, in every imaginable shape and size.

Moving closer to the window for a better look, Norah was startled to see that there was someone out there.

A figure was standing in the rain at the opening in the cedar hedge. A boy, she thought, by the size of him, and he was watching her.

The Path Through the Trees

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