Are You Haunted (part twenty-eight)

Are You Haunted

(part twenty-eight)

“She,” Powell said. Had a load to bear, looking after her husband.

And why are you taking her part? Isobel would say.

“Don’t carry too much, you’ll lose your footing,” Isobel said.

He weighed the radio. A cabinet model, an armful, a waste to carry up a steep hill, broken. Mrs. Lessing saw him capable of tinkering; he wasn’t. He ratcheted the cot from under the radio.

The box of dishes clinked. He thought he had heard one break.

“Emmaline biding her days with him, and his wife who wanted her in the room with him, at the table for meals with him. While Emmaline’s husband was off with his duties… Davis very quickly became the businessman when the mill was his own, and took up the interests of a businessman, so much for his politics.”

When Mrs. Drybrook’s plate had been clean, and Mrs. Lessing clearing dishes to the kitchen, Mr. Connolly had reached behind his chair.

“Ma’am, I’ve brought something for Mr. Kenzie to read over and sign.”

Powell looked at him astonished.

Dennis scooted back, thrusting out his legs in a disrespectful sprawl. Mrs. Drybrook said, “Mr. Kenzie will need a car, living out there. I would like him to take mine.”

The silence that followed, as Connolly penciled this in, had been her calculation.

“Three dollars a month, I think, will be a fair allowance for fuel.”

“No, ma’am…”

“I don’t drive, Mr. Kenzie.”

The answer came firm, and with such deserved rebuke, that he wished he’d said only thank you. Tovey at this point left. When her grandson had come for the car, Mrs. Drybrook had offered no resistance. But she had outflanked him, and done it with the force of law.

The clothing of his late father.

His father’s car, his grandparents’ house.

A dirty hobo, Dennis might be telling himself, has taken my place.

“They made a bargain,” Isobel said. “Letting Dennis in the house. He came back at seventeen and eighteen, getting money from Emmaline, Mrs. Drybrook asking him to stay for suppers. No, for the vanity of the world’s seeing a family under their roof, they let it be understood… And no matter, Dennis has the birthright. It was the war that gave them a pretext for sliding out. Connolly had Mrs. Drybrook put the property in trust, and now she means to sell it finally and absolutely.”

They had reached the rock shelf that forced the dogleg.

Powell glanced over his shoulder…and started.

But a tick after seeing the sheet of newspaper flutter up from the streambed, he recognized what it was.

28

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part twenty-nine)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)