Bitter Blood by Jerry Bledsoe Read Free Book Online

and let her cry on his chest.
    “If you need somebody to talk to, I’m here,” he told her. “I just want you to know that.”
    After that night, Janie and Phil were together often. Because of her fear of crime, Janie never walked anywhere on campus without an escort, and Phil took on the job full-time. He walked her to class every morning and back to her apartment in the evening. They had lunch together and chatted in lab. He started taking her out for pizza on Friday nights and dropping by her apartment on weeknights to watch TV. After Christmas, Janie took him home to meet her mother, and on Valentine’s Day she sent him a big card with two funny frogs on it with hearts bubbling over their heads.
    “You probably think you’re getting this valentine because you’re special…” it said.
    “You’re right,” was inside.
    It was signed, “Love, Janie. P.S. Hope you did well on your exam! I’m sure you did!”
    In March, Phil told her that he’d fallen in love. She cried and said she felt the same way. Shortly afterward, she took him to spend a weekend at the big house on Covered Bridge Road. He cooked a spaghetti dinner for Janie and her mother. Pooky barked at him, but Delores made much ado over him.
    An unusual thing happened that weekend. Phil was sleeping downstairs—in the room where Janie’s father had slept—when he was awakened by a strange feeling that left him bathed in sweat and gripped by fear. It was as if he had found himself in the very presence of evil, had been enveloped by it, as if the house itself was evil.
    At first he tried to rationalize it away. He had been a tough, street-smart kid in the Palisades of New Jersey, an athlete, a bodybuilder, an army officer in an airborne rapid deployment force. He’d faced all kinds of danger and never been afraid of anything. He couldn’t be scared of a house. Impossible.
    But he had to admit that he was.
    “You’ve got to get out of here,” an inner voice kept telling him. “Get out of here and take Janie with you.”
    In the dark, he fumbled for his rosary, and by clinging to it and praying he made it through the night.
    He was embarrassed to mention this to Janie, and even tried to deny to himself the feelings that had overcome him that night, but when he returned to the house a couple of weeks later, he experienced the same presence.
    “I didn’t want to be near that house,” he recalled later. “It scared hell out of me.”
    Yet he kept the fears to himself, unwilling to mention them to Janie out of concern that she might think him crazy. He would come to torture himself over that decision.
    The approach of graduation was a busy time for Janie. She studied long hours for her state board tests and had little time for other activities. But she and Phil did go to see her mother play the part of Daphine Drimmond in “There Goes the Bride” at the Little Colonel Theater, and Phil took Janie to the graduation dance, he in a three-piece corduroy suit, she in a dress of pink chiffon with a lace bodice to which Phil pinned the pink carnation corsage he bought her.
    On graduation day, May 13, Delores came with cheese and wine for Janie’s friends; on the next day, Phil left for New Jersey and a job teaching high school biology in summer school.
    “I’ll be back before you know it,” he assured Janie, then made her promise that when her work at school was finished she would come to New York to visit. He wanted her to meet his family. He would get tickets to see the Mets play the Cubs, her favorite team. They would take in all the sights and eat fantastic pizzas and have a wonderful time.
    Phil was thoroughly in love, but one thing bothered him about the relationship: the age difference.
    “No way!” he said, when Janie told him soon after they began getting close that she was thirty-nine, fourteen years older than he. He couldn’t believe it. There seemed no gap at all. He told her that age was unimportant, but he knew that in one big