Lure by Deborah Kerbel Read Free Book Online

maybe just try to duck a bit so we won’t have to take you to the emergency room?”
    And then she smiled. The gap reappeared, taunting me like a glimpse of a secret passageway to another world. All I could do was nod stupidly.
    Just like the idiotic, girl-obsessed social leper I’d clearly become.

7 - John
    In the summer of 1885, I was eleven and William was thirteen. My cousin was still coming to stay with us every summer and that heavy chip on his shoulder was still firmly in place. But, naive as I was back then, I wasn’t able to understand that doing harm to me was the only way William thought he’d be able to knock the chip loose.
    “Hello, John,” he’d said simply as I greeted him at the train station. Father had sent me in alone to fetch him while he waited in the stagecoach outside. “Are you really old enough to be here by yourself?”
    William’s voice was almost unrecognizable and the mere sound of it caused me to take a small step back. It had deepened in the past year. And there was a faint shadow of a beard hiding under the skin on his chin. For a split second, I was afraid of him. But, of course, I didn’t let on. I knew to do so would invite a level of mischief and taunting that I’d surely never before had to endure.
    “Father’s outside in the carriage,” was all I could manage to say in reply.
    The visit started out smoother than any previous year. I thought perhaps William had matured over the winter because he seemed to be on his best behaviour. Until, that is, one day in mid-July.
    It was my parent’s twentieth wedding anniversary. Mother surprised all of us by presenting Father with a bottle of French cologne for the occasion. Of course, Father complained bitterly about how ridiculous it was and how men shouldn’t act like women and put on airs, and how the smell of a good, honest, hard-working blacksmith was surely better than any foolish high-priced bottled water from France. But in the end, he agreed to put it on just as I knew he would. Mother almost always got her way with him (when the matter didn’t involve me, of course). I could smell the musky cologne lingering in the parlour air for a while after they’d left for lunch at the Yonge Street Hotel.
    Of course, William tried to convince me to put on some of the cologne myself before we left for our fishing trip over at the nearby Don River. “Don’t you know? Cologne helps keep the mosquitoes away.”
    But in the three years since William had started visiting, I’d finally learned not to fall into his traps. I wasn’t a gullible child anymore.
    Or so I liked to think.
    That was the first indication that William’s good behaviour had come to an end. The second came later that night when he first stole the pipe. I was sleeping at the time.
    “Look what I’ve got,” hissed a voice beside my head.
    I opened my eyes to the sight of William shaking me awake. I stared through the blackened room until my eyes adjusted and I could see his face. I knew by the depth of the darkness that it must be the middle of the night … what did he want now?
    “What is it?” I mumbled, my mouth full of feathers.
    “Look … let’s have a smoke.”
    He thrust an object into my face. It took me a few seconds to recognize that it was my father’s pipe. The carved ivory bowl glowed like a ghost in the darkened room. White bone emerging from wet, black soil.
    “We can’t smoke that,” I gasped. “Father will whip us if he finds out we took his pipe.”
    “Come, he’ll never find out. We’ll do it away from the bedrooms. And I’ll put it back on the mantle as soon as we’re done.”
    Somehow, through the darkness, he must have sensed my fears. Like it was a smell seeping out of my pores.
    “Don’t worry, the pipe will have cooled completely by morning. There will be not a trace left of our transgression. I promise.”
    Transgression . That word had always possessed a strange power to make me feel guilty — the sound of it was like