Close to You by Mary Jane Clark Read Free Book Online Page B

sureappliances were properly installed, checking vents and chimneys regularly for improper connections, and making sure that heating systems were inspected and serviced on a regular basis. If everything checked out and had been corrected, as the building inspector guaranteed, Eliza wasn’t unduly concerned about the safety of the house she was about to buy. She would be vigilant in having inspections done and make sure to have carbon-monoxide detectors installed.
    It bothered her far more that two people had died so tragically in the house she and Janie were going to move into. She didn’t think of herself as a superstitious person, but knowing that a husband and wife had died so senselessly within the walls of the home where she planned to live with her child gave Eliza pause. She felt the fine hairs on her bare arms rise.

Chapter 20
    In the warm-weather months, Sunday night at dusk was Meat’s favorite hour of the week. He didn’t have to work at the bar, didn’t have to get aggravated watching Eliza Blake flaunt herself on the news, and he could clear his mind by concentrating on his other passion.
    Bats.
    Since childhood, Meat had been fascinated with the world’s only flying mammals. He remembered his mother’s hysterics when she discovered that bats were nesting in the attic of their modest home. She had made Meat’s father go up there during the day and hammer the tiny creatures while they slept. Meat had been only seven years old, but he could still recall the brutality of it.
    Young Cornelius identified with the maligned, misunderstood night creatures. Yes, they were scary at first, menacing-looking with their webbed wings, flying with their mouths wide open. But as he learned from the library books he checked out after the hammering episode, their open mouths were the way they “saw” the insects they ate. Echolocation, it was called. A flying bat sent out a stream of clicks through its open mouth. By listening to the echoesthat came back, the bat could tell where another object was, how big it was, how fast it was moving.
    Meat had tried to explain to his mother that the bats were good for them. They lived near the marshy, New Jersey meadowlands where mosquitoes and other insects thrived. The bats were a natural pesticide.
    His mother had stared at him, as if he were strange. But she was always doing that. The nuns yelled at him when he chose bats for the subject of his book reports. The other kids said his bat fixation was weird.
    So Cornelius stopped talking about bats, but he kept learning about them. And as soon as he moved out of his parents’ home, he bought a bat house, erecting it on a fifteen-foot pole in a clearing in the woods behind his apartment building, making sure the wooden house would be able to get at least the six hours of direct sunlight it needed during the day. First he bought a common single-chambered house that could hold fifty bats. After that was filled, he ordered a larger, multichambered design that could contain a nursery colony of two hundred.
    The bats gave birth just once a year, one pup at a time. The babies fed on their mother’s milk for about six weeks before they were weaned. In the springtime, Meat could wait in the clearing until the adult bats flew out at night in search of food, and then approach the house, seeing the tiny, bald pups clustered together helplessly inside.
    Meat felt sad as he lounged at the edge of the clearing on this late-summer evening, anticipating the emergence of the bats as they flew out to feed in the night sky. Soon the cold weather would set in and the bats would leave for the winter. They would fly to caves and mines up to a hundred miles away and go into hibernation, hanging in their characteristic upside-down position, their body temperatures dropping and their breathing and heart rates slowing down. In their sleeping state they would use very little energy and could live through the winter months