A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries by Kaylie Jones Read Free Book Online

for each other. For the first time since his arrival, I was happy for long stretches that Billy was my brother.
    The parents were not around much. The reason we were there with the Smiths was that our father and Mr. Smith were writing a screenplay together “which could mean a lot of money,” our father explained. Our mother and Mrs. Smith went to the racetrack at Clairefontaine practically every day and all four of them went to the casino in Deauville at night. After our nannies brought us home from the beach we were given hours of free time to roam the property and invent games. The only iron rule was that we weren’t to disturb the writers at work. Their presence in an upstairs room of the house hung over our activities like the eyes of God.
    The house looked more like a château than a villa; it was a long, two-story stone edifice with a high slate roof and arching windows with little balconies. On the ground floor, you could walk out through the tall windows of any room, onto the gravel terrace and down some steps to the rose gardens. Around the entire house went the white pebbled driveway, and around the driveway were enormous pink and pale-blue hydrangea bushes and white rhododendrons. There was a long, sloping green lawn where several ancient, magnificent oaks grew, and beyond the lawn was the untamed, deep green forest.
    The Smith girls’ favorite game was croquet. They would dress up and pretend they were duchesses parading on the lawn. Haw haw haw, they would laugh in a throaty way, as though whatever was funny was really not funny at all. It seemed to Billy and me that the two oldest girls were just as unpleasant to each other as they were to us, but with them it seemed to be some kind of inside joke and they never really became offended by one another.
    Billy and I took to the woods, not so much because we loved the woods, but because it was the one place we were certain not to encounter the Smiths. “The woods are barbaric,” Cassandra often said.
    In the middle of the forest was a green chicken-wire fence that you couldn’t see until you were right up against it. Behind the fence the trees and brambles went on out of sight. We decided that this must be where our property ended and the neighbors’ began.
    Billy and I invented all sorts of games, our favorites being Thierry la Fronde Saves The Fair Maiden From Certain Death At The Hands Of The Forest Elves, and The Heroic Cowboy Finds An Indian Squaw Tied To A Tree In The Woods Dying Of Hunger And Thirst. It always ended up with And They Get Married And Build A House In The Forest. That part wasn’t much of a denouement because, after all, Billy was my brother and we never even kissed. Sometimes we looked for the doors to Elves’ houses in the thick roots of the large trees and at the bases of the big, flat brown mushrooms. This grew disappointing after a while, because the doors were too well hidden and although we called to the Elves and promised them no harm, they would not come out to play.
    One afternoon, I stood with my back to a big tree, arms encircling the trunk behind me (I would not let Billy really tie me up, I didn’t trust him that much). The woods were so dense and green that the sun-filled sky hardly made it through to the ground. There was the rustle of the leaves disturbing the fine ribbons of light around me, and then a face, pale, greenish, with a disheveled shock of dirty-blond hair, was suddenly staring at me, its dirty hands gripping the diamonds in the chicken wire.
    “AAHHHH!” I screamed, and started to run in the direction Billy had gone.
    “N’ai pas peur!” a boy’s voice called out. “Don’t be afraid! I live here.”
    Billy came charging out of the brambles just ahead of me, and I stopped running.
    “Salut!” the boy said. Billy gazed at him with his suspicious and impenetrable blue eyes.
    “Salut,” Billy said through a closed mouth. He had a long stick in his hand and was whacking at the underbrush.
    “I