Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger Read Free Book Online Page A

ice pick?
Edie went hunting for her reading glasses. By the time Jack lumbered into the dining room she had read the first few pages of the letter and was making her way through the will.
    Jack Poole had once been handsome, in a corn-fed, college-athlete sort of way. His black hair now had a sumptuous grey streak. He wore it longer than the other guys at the bank. He was quite tall and towered over his petite wife and daughters. The years had coarsened his features and thickened his waistline. Jack wore suits so much of his waking life that on the weekends he liked to be slovenly. At the moment he was wearing an ancient maroon bathrobe and a splitting, enormous pair of sheepskin slippers.
    “Fee, fi, fo, fum,” Jack said. This was an old joke, the rest of it lost in the mists of the twins’ earliest childhood. It meant,
Get me some coffee or I will eat you.
Julia poured a cup for her father and set it before him. “Okay,” he said. “I’m up. Where’s the fire?”
    “It’s Elspeth,” said Edie. “She’s not just leaving it to them, she’s prying them away from us.”
    “Say what?” Jack held out his hand and Edie put part of the letter into it. They sat next to each other, reading.
    “Vindictive bitch,” Jack said, without much emotion or surprise. Julia and Valentina sat down at the table and watched their parents.
Who are these people? What happened? Why did Aunt Elspeth hate them? Why do they hate her?
The twins widened their eyes at each other.
We’ll find out.
Jack finished reading and groped in his bathrobe pocket for his cigarettes and lighter. He put them on the table but did not light one; he glanced at Valentina, who frowned. Jack put his hand over the pack to reassure himself that it was there. Valentina took her inhaler from her sweatshirt pocket, set it on the table and smiled at her father.
    Edie looked up at Valentina. “If you don’t accept, most of it goes to charity,” she said. The twins wondered how much of their conversation she had overheard. Edie was reading a codicil of the will. It instructed someone named Robert Fanshaw to remove all personal papers from the flat, including diaries, letters and photographs, and bequeathed these papers to him. Edie wondered who this Robert person was, that her sister had made him custodian of all their history.
But the main thing is she’s arranged for the papers to not be in the flat when the twins arrive.
That was the thing Edie had most feared, the intersection of the twins and whatever Elspeth had left in the way of evidence.
    Jack put the letter from Elspeth on the table. He sat back in his chair and looked at his wife. Edie held the will at arm’s length and scowled at it, rereading.
You don’t seem all that surprised, darling,
thought Jack. Julia and Valentina were watching Edie read. Julia looked rapt, Valentina anxious. Jack sighed. Although he had been trying to push his daughters out of the ranch house and into the real world, the world he had in mind was college, preferably an Ivy League college on a full scholarship. The twins’ SAT scores were almost perfect, though their grades were wildly uneven and by now their transcripts would give any director of admissions pause. He imagined Julia and Valentina safely ensconced at Harvard or Yale, or even at Sarah Lawrence; heck, Bennington would be okay. Valentina glanced at him and smiled, raised her nearly invisible eyebrows just slightly. Jack thought about Elspeth as he had last seen her, weeping in line at the airport.
You don’t remember her, girls. You have no idea what she was capable of.
Jack had been relieved when Elspeth died.
I didn’t realise you had any more tricks up your sleeve, Miss Noblin.
He had never failed to underestimate her. He stood up, scooped his cigarettes and lighter into his palm and headed for the den. He shut the door, leaned against it and lit up.
At least you’re dead.
He inhaled smoke and let it stream through his nostrils slowly.
One Noblin sister is