Ribbons by J R Evans Read Free Book Online

mechanism inside that plunked out the tune. A cylinder with spiky bumps flicked the metal fingers over the tiny sounding board. The cheery notes it played seemed out of place coming from the tarnished clockwork. The wood was stained dark, and there were very few decorations or embellishments on it, but if you turned it upside down there was a brass plate etched with the title of the song and its composer: Old Folks at Home by Stephen Foster .
    There was also something scratched into the wood next to the plate. Foster had wondered about it many times. It seemed like a doodle, but the scratches were deep and precise. Meant to last. Two parallel lines were joined by an arch, with a third line between them ending in a diamond shape under the apex. Above the arch was a kind of lopsided cross or X . The pattern reminded Foster of a logo or a symbol. He thought it might be a manufacturer’s mark of some kind, but he had never found any reference to it. That’s also where the tiny key stuck out.
    He closed the lid and gave the key a few turns.
    He was standing in the front of a condemned building. If he were twelve again, he would have been sure it was haunted. Now, in his thirties, he was more mature, and he only suspected it was haunted. Of course, he had been here when he was twelve. The weathered sign near the entry proclaimed that it used to be the Tule Springs Group Home . From the look of it, the building hadn’t been anyone’s home for several years. Foster hadn’t seen it in at least fifteen. Before the windows had been broken and the roof had started to sag; before the paint had started flaking and the birds came to roost; before the lawn died and the graffiti tags; this was his home.
    He lifted the lid on the music box, and the tune started plunking out again. Foster tried to keep up with the lyrics.
    “Something . . . something . . . days I squandered,” he whispered. “Many the songs I sung.”
    The name of the building actually made no sense to Foster. A group home could be anything. It sounded like a place people went when they were waiting to die. Instead, it was a place you went when you were waiting to start your life. And if there was a Tule Springs, it was nowhere near here. Like it did everywhere in Las Vegas, if you didn’t water your lawn every day it would turn to dust and clumps of weeds. Even when the orphanage was full of kids, the playground lawn never saw a shade of green that wasn’t half-yellow.
    “When I was playing with my brother,” he sang. The words were coming to him faster now. “Happy was I.”
    The playground looked worse than the building. The teeter-totter looked cancerous with rust. He was afraid of the sound it might make if it actually teetered. He remembered busting a tooth on one of those little horses mounted on a big spring. That horse wobbled to one side now, and some of the paint had flaked off its face, making its eyes look wide and panicked. It seemed like it was trying to run away from a fire or something but got stuck on that damn spring instead. The swing set still had one seat intact, so he sat down and whispered his song.
    “Oh, take me to my kind old mother. There let me live and die.”
    He let it play on a little longer before clicking the lid closed. They had told him that when he’d come to the Tule Springs Group Home, the music box came with him. He was too young to remember, but he liked to think that his mother had left it with him. Some last act of love and desperation. Foster imagined her telling herself that she would come back for him someday. When things were better. He guessed things had never gotten better.
    The double doors in front were chained and padlocked together by the handles. He gave them a tug, but they seemed pretty solid. He walked around the side of the building. It stood on the outskirts of a residential area, but nobody saw him. That or nobody cared. A fence followed the property line on three sides—one of those chain-link fences