Kepler’s Dream by Juliet Bell Read Free Book Online

kids and balloons—black and white balloons, it was an old photo—and a huge birthday cake with seven lit candles. She was leaning in, her lips getting ready to blow.
    â€œElla!” my grandmother called sharply. “Must you dawdle?”
    I hurried out of there.
    Lou was trotting ahead. He and Grandmother (I still felt weird calling her that, even in my head) had gone out through a different door into the next room, which seemed like a great hall. The more of the house I saw, the smaller I felt. Was I somehow shrinking? There was no furniture in this room. I meannothing regular like a couch or a rocking chair. Still, it was absolutely packed with … STUFF. Racks of bottles, wine, I guess, or maybe potions; a suit of armor; two mini–totem poles; another overflowing bookcase; and everywhere more paintings, of ships, giraffes, lakes, mountains. Across the floor lay a flattened animal with a fierce dead head that made the hackles go up on Lou’s back. Mine too. It looked like roadkill—if you lived in India, maybe.
    â€œThat’s my tiger skin,” said our tour guide proudly. “I call him Tigger. Sweet, isn’t he?”
    Not really. Had she killed the animal herself? It wouldn’t have amazed me.
    â€œNow, this”—my grandmother walked down a few steps at the end of the hall and ducked her head under another doorway—“will be the room you and Lou share.”
    After the rest, it was surprisingly normal: a regular size, with two twin beds and a table between them. The kind of room you might find in an actual home, rather than a place that was a cross between a museum, a junk shop, and the set for a horror movie.
    One difference was the real daylight inside there. Along the near wall were windows that looked out onto the courtyard. Eventually I figured out that the House of Mud was built in the shape of a rectangle with the courtyard in the center, though you couldn’t do the entire circuit because there was a dead-end at my bedroom. But you could walk from my room all the wayaround and end up in yet another dark and dusty chamber, filled with papers, photographs, mouse droppings, and masks from Africa.
    I needed a map.
    â€œHere is a list of people who have stayed in this room.” Grandmother pointed to a stretch of wall by the doorway, thirty or so names going down, pen or pencil scribbles on white paint. I saw my dad’s a couple of times, and next to it once … my mom’s. That made me shiver. Those were two names,
Walter and Amy Mackenzie,
I never thought of in the same breath. They didn’t belong side by side. “You may add yours when you leave,” she added. Sure, if I ever got out of there
.
“A pen is on the writing desk, where you’ll find stationery as well.”
    Another part of the conspiracy to get me to write letters.
    â€œWell, Ella.” My grandmother cleared her throat. “I’ll let you take a rest and freshen up after your journey. Dinner will be early—five thirty. You can come out to the patio at five, if you like, for iced tea. I imagine you’ll want”—she gave my outfit another skeptical look—“to put on some different clothes.”
    â€œOK.” I should have packed a ball gown! I knew there was something I was forgetting. “Thank you.” I remembered to say that, at least.
    â€œI hope you’ll feel welcome,” she said before leaving my cell,
I mean bedroom, but as she was practically in Tigger Hall when she said it, I wasn’t even sure I had heard her correctly.
Welcome?
    â€œWell, Lou,” I said to him quietly, when I was sure she wasgone. “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Santa Rosa anymore.” He didn’t get the joke, though.
    Filling the time between “I hope you’ll feel welcome” and five o’clock was a challenge. I sent a few notes on my phone to Abbie; told Lou to stop drinking water from the