A Wrinkle in Time Quintet by Madeleine L'Engle Read Free Book Online Page A

gently.
    “I don’t think
I
was. But she’s upset.”
    “What about?”
    “Father.”
    Calvin led Meg across the lawn. The shadows of the trees were long and twisted and there was a heavy,sweet, autumnal smell to the air. Meg stumbled as the land sloped suddenly downhill, but Calvin’s strong hand steadied her. They walked carefully across the twins’ vegetable garden, picking their way through rows of cabbages, beets, broccoli, pumpkins. Looming on their left were the tall stalks of corn. Ahead of them was a small apple orchard bounded by a stone wall, and beyond this the woodsthrough which they had walked that afternoon. Calvin led the way to the wall, and then sat there, his red hair shining silver in the moonlight, his body dappled with patterns from the tangle of branches. He reached up, pulled an apple off a gnarled limb, and handed it to Meg, then picked one for himself. “Tell me about your father.”
    “He’s a physicist.”
    “Sure, we all know that. And he’s supposedto have left your mother and gone off with some dame.”
    Meg jerked up from the stone on which she was perched, but Calvin grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her back down. “Hold it, kid. I didn’t say anything you hadn’t heard already, did I?”
    “No,” Meg said, but continued to pull away. “Let me go.”
    “Come on, calm down.
You
know it isn’t true,
I
know it isn’t true. And how
any
body after onelook at your mother could believe any man would leave her for another woman just shows how far jealousy will make people go. Right?”
    “I guess so,” Meg said, but her happiness had fled and she was back in a morass of anger and resentment.
    “Look, dope.” Calvin shook her gently. “I just want to get things straight, sort of sort out the fact from fiction. Your father’s a physicist. That’s a fact,yes?”
    “Yes.”
    “He’s a Ph.D. several times over.”
    “Yes.”
    “Most of the time he works alone but some of the time he was at the Institute for Higher Learning in Princeton. Correct?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then he did some work for the government, didn’t he?”
    “Yes.”
    “You take it from there. That’s all I know.”
    “That’s about all I know, too,” Meg said. “Maybe Mother knows more. I don’t know. What he did was—well,it was what they call Classified.”
    “Top Secret, you mean?”
    “That’s right.”
    “And you don’t even have any idea what it was about?”
    Meg shook her head. “No. Not really. Just an idea because of where he was.”
    “Well, where?”
    “Out in New Mexico for a while; we were with him there; and then he was in Florida at Cape Canaveral, and we were with him there, too. And then he was going to be travelinga lot, so we came here.”
    “You’d always had this house?”
    “Yes. But we used to live in it just in the summer.”
    “And you don’t know where your father was sent?”
    “No. At first we got lots of letters. Mother and Father always wrote each other every day. I think Mother still writes him every night. Every once in a while the postmistress makes some kind of a crack about all her letters.”
    “I supposethey think she’s pursuing him or something,” Calvin said, rather bitterly. “They can’t understand plain, ordinary love when they see it. Well, go on. What happened next?”
    “Nothing happened,” Meg said. “That’s the trouble.”
    “Well, what about your father’s letters?”
    “They just stopped coming.”
    “You haven’t heard anything at all?”
    “No,” Meg said. “Nothing.” Her voice was heavy with misery.
    Silence fell between them, as tangible as the dark tree shadows that fell across their laps and that now seemed to rest upon them as heavily as though they possessed a measurable weight of their own.
    At last Calvin spoke in a dry, unemotional voice, not looking at Meg. “Do you think he could be dead?”
    Again Meg leaped up, and again Calvin pulled her down. “No! They’d have told us if he were dead!There’s