Dale Loves Sophie to Death by Robb Forman Dew Read Free Book Online

Dinah to rise, to exercise, to shape her day. To the left of that picture was a portrait of the girl’s mother, Mrs. Horton, who looked out into the room with a sweet and shy expression on her rather long, oval face. Dinah liked confronting these two people every morning—the one getting right up and getting on with things, tough-minded, self-assured. The other woman was more wary than her daughter, and had more reasonable expectations, but was still prepared to find goodwill and cooperation through every hour; that was what her face said.
    The curtains at the bedroom windows blowsed out in the light morning breeze, and Dinah could lie in bed and look out at the village of Enfield. It was her hometown, but only recently had it become a place that other people came to on purpose. The Hortons had been the first; they had come here to make this their winter home, while they spent their summers in Europe. Enfield was only eight miles from Fort Lyman, which was a town of no particular consequence, but which provided services and such mundane necessities as weekend people often need. It was only forty miles from the Columbus airport, and real estate was cheap. So the Hortons had been the pioneers of a movement, only gently afoot, to restore and rejuvenate the village, because soon after they bought and restored this large and even elegant house, other commuter families from nearby cities began to buy up the fine old houses in the town. Dinah could look from her second-story bedroom window all up and down Gilbert Street, which was the right-hand side of the “H” that was Enfield. She could look out through the tall maples at the several handsome houses now in various states of renovation.
    When Dinah’s parents had finally separated after years and years of stony accommodation, Dr. Briggs had bought the house directly across the street from the Hortons’. After her parents’ silence had literally been shattered with a bang, after her father had been shot under such peculiar circumstances, and then after he had been so long recuperating, he had finally bought the house on the corner of Gilbert and Hoxsey Streets and come home to it alone. Dinah’s mother had taken on the interior decoration of it; she met with him at his house or at her shop just as she would have met with any other client. That’s what she said; Dinah knew it couldn’t have been so simple. Eventually, her father had begun the direction of the exhaustive physical renovation; he had never found a contractor who suited him. The work was extensive and tedious and still in progress after many long summers. So on clear mornings when the hammering and the shouting of the workmen would begin across the street with the earliest light, before the heat built up, Dinah would wake up and look out at her father’s house without really thinking about it. It only caught her eye there, before she moved off into her life and the pattern of her day. She could look out and see with what perfection these workmen were applying the copper flashing along the ridge of the roof. It shone brilliantly in the sun; by this time next year it would have weathered to a fine, muted, greenish gold.
    The entire establishment intrigued her; it intrigued her that her father was overseeing all this activity with such painstaking care and apparent deliberation. She noticed that each detail was being executed with determined fidelity to the era of the house’s original glory. Last year she had watched the slate roof replace the asphalt shingles and had been amazed at the beauty of the square gray tiles lapping over the scalloped ones, which were the color of dusky rose. The roof had turned out just like a wedding cake in a bakery window, symmetrically assembled, and now iced with shining copper.
    She could not account for this aesthetic gentling of her father. He had scarcely seemed even to live within the walls of her childhood house—Polly’s house—and he certainly hadn’t ever shown any