[Oxrun Station] The Last Call of Mourning by Charles L. Grant Read Free Book Online Page B

She did not wait for a response, only opened the door and eased Cyd in, closed it and leaned over when the window was rolled down. "Wallace's dead, child. I thought you ... I would have thought your father told you about it."
    "No. God, no, Iris, I didn't know." She fumbled for a word. "They never said a word. I . . . how?"
    The old woman tapped a large-knuckled finger on the steering wheel. "We don't know for sure. Doctor claims it was his heart. He was walking back from his day in the park last . . . oh, last August, I think it was. You was still away, anyway. He came up to the police station and just keeled over. Just like that. There wasn't anything anyone could do for him. Doctor claims he was dead before he hit the sidewalk, he says."
    "Come on, Iris," she said. "His heart? Good Lord, Wallace could lift—"
    "I know, I know," Iris said. "But that's the way of it sometimes, I suppose. You go all your natural life not a sick day to your name, and when your time comes whether you're ready or not—" and she snapped her fingers, looked back toward the yard. "Paul, he took it hard. Still does, in fact. He keeps checking his pulse, things like that. They was the same age, you know. Seventy-two almost to the day." She straightened suddenly. "It happens," she said. "Now get off. We'll be there, don't you worry. We ain't never let you down yet, not for twenty years. And Missy .. . Miss Yarrow ..."
    Cyd could not meet the expression that worked the old woman's face. Instead, she switched on the ignition and raced the engine once. "Wednesday," she said after a cough at her lap. "And Iris, thanks, really. To tell you the truth, I don't trust those college kids, either."
    There was a brief moment when she thought Iris Lennon would release a rare laugh. But it passed, and the best the woman had was another slight curling of those thin, bloodless lips. Cyd waved then, and backed into the street.
    Poor Wallace, she thought as she turned the car around.
    But as she reached the corner and looked up into the mirror, she wondered for a second who was the worse off—the Lennons or Wallace McLeod.
    Iris was still on the front lawn, bending over stiffly to pick up a dead branch. When she straightened, she stared at the car, tossed the branch into the gutter and vanished around the side of the house.
    When she was gone the street was lifeless again, and Cyd could not repress a shudder as she made the left turn and headed back for the village center.
    Who was worse off? she wondered again, and did not like the answer that came immediately to mind.

4

    "I was hoping you'd be the first, you and that dumb, beautiful white plume."
    She had been leaning against the hood of the car and staring at the shop when Bella Innes, Dale Blake's assistant at the toy store, had hurried over to tell her she'd accepted a delivery. The cartons were in Bartlett's storeroom. Cyd had been unable to breathe. She hadn't expected anything to come until Monday at the earliest.
    Now, suddenly, it had begun.
    When she wasn't looking, her first dreams had arrived.
    Twenty minutes later she was alone in a skeleton-work forest of racks and shelves and banded brown boxes. Her hands trembled. Her eyes watered. And she thought it an augury more favorable than a vaulted soaring eagle that the first carton she'd opened carried on top a half-dozen copies of her childhood lover. Setting aside the invoice sheet, she'd picked out the paper-bound book and carried it reverently to that section she had marked with a hand-lettered sign laboriously fashioned for' the marking of the Drama.
    In the center at the top.
    The tears were unashamed that soaked her cheeks, were absorbed into her sweater as she set Cyrano in his place. Then she stepped back to examine the Gascon's profile, the sweep of his burgundy hat, the cloud of his plume. She began to laugh without the tears stopping, felt her legs grow weak and she sat on the floor.
    With a single slash of his rapier, deBergerac had broken