After her husband and baby daughter die within days of each other, Emily Foster decides to take in other people's children, both to supplment her income and provide her son with company. The children she settles upon are Amy and Tommy Falk, whose mother has lately died and whose father is a care...
Bevis was much more interesting to me now than he had been when I had refused his offer of marriage five years before. I had felt twinges of regret then. I now suffered more. Bevis had not lost his disarming gaiety, but he had stopped being ashamed of his brains and his feelings. The affable idio...
I woke on that thought after a restless sleep troubled by nightmares. Dale had come over after dinner Thursday night looking exhausted. Mary's body was not in the dumpster, nor did the Astoria police find other signs of her there, and there was no evidence of a struggle in...
When I stumbled down to the kitchen, Jay was up, dressed, and on the phone. He had made coffee. I poured a cup and sat in the nook, sipping and staring vaguely in the direction of the Cramers' mobile home. The sky was overcast, but it was not raining. The wind had died. Ja...
Johnny was finally finishing volume one of Richard Falk's history and the old jingle kept running through his head as he transformed Falk's scrawled words into his own neat copperplate. Somewhere in the middle of Bavaria Johnny had lost interest in the War of the Spanish S...
Yeats, "Meditations in Time of Civil War" In retrospect, I suppose it was then that Maeve took over. At the time, I was too stunned to notice. She charged past me into the living room, and I heard her speak sharply to Joe. Dad said, "Lark, my dear, do you want a little whi...
Wheeler, was coming for dinner. A fiftyish widower who instructed Matt and half a dozen other sprouts in the rudiments of Latin, Wheeler had already proposed to Emily three times, and she knew she would hear his heavy gallantries this night with special impatience. If the same florid phrases had ...
"Stop, thief!" the Maggie Thatcher clone was shrieking. "The bugger stole my bag! Pull the emergency lever!" No one responded, but the murmurings grew louder. Newspapers rustled. The train sped on. I had regained my balance, but Milos was heavy. "Are you all right? What's ...
I think Jay was out on the lawn, scraping up vomit, or maybe he was rooting through the garbage looking for the container the poison was brought in. The search of our effects had been thorough. So far no vial of suspicious liquid had appeared. So Jay was destined to grub. I was outside loading ou...