And she did, escorting the eight of us up the front stairs.
But in my own mind, not far below the surface of consciousness, I was still staring into Mark Quatrain’s bedroom. Joey still asked, “Wanna see the upstairs?” He grabbed my elbow and started tugging me toward the steep back stairway.
Barely above a whisper, I asked, “Are you sure it’s all right? Your parents acted so weird about it.”
“Sure,” said Joey, “it’s not as if it’s locked or anything.”
Even so, there was something sneaky about the way we climbed those back stairs. As he reached to open the door, I expected to feel a rush of cold air from the unused top floor, but it was plenty warm up there.
To my surprise, the door led to a kitchen, which looked a lot like the one downstairs, but with a much higher ceiling. There was no food around, but there was a toaster and such on the counter, and you could see gold-edged dishes through the glass doors of the cupboards. Everything was neat, nothing was dusty, but you could tell that no one lived there. “C’mon,” said Joey, heading through a doorway toward the front of the house.
I followed. A hall—with a bedroom on one side, an office on the other—led to the main room and its arched window across the front wall. I stood gaping at the vast space. The ceilings were slanted, like an attic’s, only much, much higher.
The furniture and paintings and rugs all looked like they came out of Mom’s decorating magazines. At the back end of the room, chairs faced a brick fireplace that was tall enough to walk into. It had shiny brass things like big chessmen that kept the logs in place, and there was a metal rack that held a bunch of long fireplace tools. Along the side walls, there were rows and rows of built-in bookcases with cabinets beneath them. There must have been tons of books, but now and then there were gaps on the shelves, and these were filled with old things like candlesticks and framed pictures and marble statues of guys’ heads. At the front end of the room, everything faced the wide half-circle window. Through it, you could see the bare branches of the treetops and, beyond them, most of the town and, farther still, fields. Near the window, there was an unusual railing that looked like the banister of the front staircase down in the entry hall, but it didn’t go anywhere. Every few feet along the top of the railing there was a fancy piece of carved light-colored wood that looked like some kind of plant.
Joey saw me looking at these, so I asked what they were.
His eyes got wide as he told me, “King-things!”
“Huh?”
“Watch this,” he told me, walking over to one of the wooden plants—they looked sort of like pineapples, but without the leaves on top. He took hold of it, and, to my surprise, it lifted right off the railing. Attached to the bottom of the plant was a round wooden stick, maybe a couple of feet long, that slipped out of a hole drilled in the top of the banister. “They’re all this way,” Joey explained, then lifted it in the air, kind of like a drum major. “See?” he said. “It’s a king-thing.” He started marching around the room with it, waving at unseen crowds with his other hand, and you could practically see some big furry cape hanging from his neck. I have to admit, it was pretty funny, and he liked it when I laughed, but he himself couldn’t laugh—he was the king, and I guess kings have to be serious.
He kept this up for a while, but as far as I was concerned, the game was over. (It was sort of babyish, if you ask me.) So I ambled around the room looking at things, touching things, and I decided it was the most beautiful room I’d ever seen. I hoped that someday I could live in a place like this, which didn’t look anything like the house where Mom and I lived at home in Illinois.
Like the kitchen, the big room was clean and tidy, but clearly not lived in. The rooms were kept this way for a reason, I figured, but I had no idea why. It was as if someone had gone away, and these rooms—separate from the rest of the house, a home in and of themselves—were being kept presentable so that they might be rented or something. I asked Joey, “Who lived here?”
He stopped marching around and thought for a moment. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “It’s always been this way. Hazel comes up and cleans now and then, and Hank fixes things that need fixing. I like to come up and look around or snoop out the window or play king, but otherwise”—he slipped the king-thing back into its hole—“no one’s ever up here.”
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About the Author
Michael Craft is the author of more than a dozen novels and three stage plays. He is best known as the author of the popular Mark Manning series, set in the Midwest, as well as the Claire Gray series, which takes place in Palm Springs, California. Three of Craft’s novels have been honored as national finalists for Lambda Literary Awards. His latest mystery novel, The MacGuffin, features a new protagonist, architect Cooper Brant.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 by Michael Craft
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
978-1-4804-3395-3
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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