Crooked House by Joe McKinney, Wayne Miller Read Free Book Online

left arm was across his chest and he was scratching his right shoulder just under the sleeve of his T-shirt. He hadn’t even realized he was doing it.
    “Hey, Mom, can I have this room ? Please.”
    Sarah turned back to her daughter. She seemed to study the huge cloth panels that affixed to the ceiling like a royal canopy. “Well, I don’t know. This is a boy’s room, isn’t it?”
    “Mom, I love it.”
    “It’s a big house, and it’s a long way from our bedroom. Don’t you want to look around at some of the other rooms?”
    “It isn’t far from your room . There are stairs right outside the door there, at the end of the hall. Remember the pictures we saw? Your room is right below us.”
    “Well, I...What do you think, Robert?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess – ”
    “Cool!” Angela said . “Thanks, you guys. Hey, Dad, I’m hungry. Can we get a pizza?”
    Robert smiled . Kids, they had the attention span of a gnat.
    To Sarah he said: “That’s probably a good idea. All our kitchen stuff’s out in the car, and we can’t really cook anything with the power out.”
    She nodded . “Okay, I’ll try to find a pizza place. You bring our stuff in from the car, okay?”
    He nodded.
    She put a hand on his arm. “Hey, you sure you’re okay?”
    “Yeah,” he said as his hand again found the itch under his shirtsleeve. “Yeah, I’m good.”
     
    *
     
    They ate the pizza right out of the box; the three of them seated on the floor in the downstairs library, laughing at the way the pizza delivery guy had gawked at the size of their new house. Outside, the rain had slacked off to a gentle patter on the windows. The power still hadn’t come on, but they had candles now – lemon verbena-scented ones, Sarah’s favorite – and the guttering yellow light went a long way toward brightening everybody’s mood. Listening to the girls talk, Robert started to drift. There was something so very pleasant about all this, the candlelight, and dinner on the floor, the rain outside.
    “What do you think, Dad?”
    Robert looked at Angela. She’d asked him something and he missed it. “I’m sorry, what?”
    “The tree, where are we gonna put it ? I think we should put it in here.”
    He looked at the empty corner of the library where she was pointing . “Yeah,” he said. “I think – ” He stopped, looked at Sarah for confirmation, and shrugged. “ – yeah. That looks good to me. What do you think?”
    Sarah nodded. “Yeah. Robert, you’re scratching yourself again.”
    He looked down at where his hand was busy scratching . It was the other arm this time, though. Damn, that was weird, he thought. He didn’t even realize he was doing it.
    “You think you’re allergic to something in here?” she asked.
    “Maybe you’ve got the measles?” Angela said.
    “I don’t have the measles,” Robert said, smiling at her . “I doubt I’m allergic to anything, though. I’ve never had any allergies. I think I’m just tired.”
    “I wouldn’t doubt it . You drove all day.”
    Earlier, before the pizza guy got there, they’d agreed to spend their first night in their new house in sleeping bags on the library floor . It was Angela’s idea. Like a camp out, she said. So Robert unrolled his sleeping bag, pulled one of the pillows off the couch, and stretched out. “You guys mind if I hit the hay?” he asked. “You can stay up, I don’t care. I’m beat, though, and I’ve got that meeting with Thom in the morning.”
    He put his head down, certain that he would fall asleep without any trouble at all, but he couldn’t keep his eyes closed . He pulled the sleeping bag over his shoulder and tried to tune the girls out as they talked about what Angela’s new school was going to be like and how they wanted to do her room and a dozen other things, but he couldn’t get to sleep. Maybe there was something to him being allergic, he thought. It felt like he was itching all over.
     
    *
     
    Sometime