Behind the Bonehouse by Sally Wright Read Free Book Online

and walk for awhile, I’ll start to feel some better.
    Booker stepped out his front door, heading straight east down his long drive toward Midway’s main street. It was cooler after the shower that had come before he ate, and the lawn and the oaks lining the driveway, and the hydrangea bushes with their huge dark leaves tucked in the shade of the oak trees, looked less dusty and greener now than when he’d driven in.
    He waved to old Miss Anna Eldrige, tending her azaleas across the street in her tiny front garden, and he told himself to sit on her porch and chat on his way home. He hadn’t talked to Miss Anna since Martha’d moved in, and it was time he made the effort. There weren’t too many left who knew her, and most of those couldn’t get out on their own anymore, and had to wait for someone from church to drive them over for a visit.
    Booker turned left toward the center of town, walking under the old trees on the west side of Main. They made him feel sheltered and calmer, though he couldn’t have said why. Maybe the laciness, and the filtered evening light that dappled the cracked old stones in the sidewalk, and the soft green in the yards. It reminded him of walks with his grandmother, and with Alice too, through Midway, out past the horse farms on the south side, talking about their day at work, and how their horses were doing, and who was going to water the garden when they got home.
    He was thinking he’d get him a pack of spearmint gum down in the center of town, as he walked past the Midway College president’s house, all white-washed brick and pristine gardens as neat and tidy as Robert from the college had kept them for forty years.
    Booker stayed on the west side of the next block too, and then crossed over to the east, where he stopped and stared in the window of Lehman’s Antiques at an oval mahogany dining room table he knew nothing whatever about, except that it was a work of art that few could’ve made in his day.
    He was feeling worse rather than better, even though he’d walked slowly and the evening had sunk into shade. Perspiration was running down his chest now, and nausea was sweeping through him. His left arm too had begun to ache, even before he reached inside the breast pocket of his shirt, and pulled out the small cardboard box that held his nitroglycerin. He’d taken two out, and was trying to get them under his tongue when a pain in his chest like a vise around his ribs knocked his knees out from under him, and threw him down onto the stone step in front of Lehman’s door.
    Mertie Mae Trasker was on the west side of Main, just across from Booker Franklin, coming up the hill from the railroad tracks, walking her collie after dinner, and she hollered out to poor Mr. Booker and hurried across the street.
    He was dead when she got there, when she knelt down beside him. That’s what she figured, but she chaffed his wrists anyway, repeating his name the whole time. The old tan-and-white collie was sniffing Booker’s shoes when Mertie Mae tugged hard on her leash, and started trotting east toward home to call the county sheriff.

CHAPTER THREE
    Excerpt From Jo Grant Munro’s Journal
    Thursday, August 8th, 1963
    P oor Booker. Poor Spencer. No one had any idea Booker was ill, and I can see Spencer worrying that there was something he should have noticed, or should have done, and didn’t. I’ve invited him for dinner tomorrow, and I hope he’ll actually come.
    We had our own excitement here tonight. Bob Harrison appeared at eight o’clock, without calling ahead, which wasn’t like him at all, saying he needed to talk to Alan.
    They went into our farm office/library, and I took Emmy out to visit Sam to give them time alone. When I got back, Bob was gone, and Alan managed to look stunned, furious, and gratified at the same time while he told me that Bob’s distributor in Canada had recorded Carl and Butch