Second Child by John Saul Read Free Book Online

hours passed, but her fingers never tired, and her arms never ached from holding the material.
    For it was not truly Melissa who worked through those endless hours. Not Melissa, but some other child, who sewed steadily in the silence of the night until the first rays of sun began to creep up out of the sea. Then, her work completed, she allowed herself to sleep.
    Cora Peterson woke promptly at five-thirty the next morning, just as she had nearly every day of her life. Shedressed, then made her bed, glancing uneasily out her bedroom window every now and then, looking across the yard and up at the closed windows of Melissa’s room. She thought about breaking her normal routine and going directly to the main house to see if Melissa was all right.
    Certainly, she hadn’t looked all right last night, when she’d been unable to finish her supper. The poor child’s nerves had been strung tight as a violin string, and her face had looked positively drawn. But perhaps she’d simply been tired, Cora thought, and forgotten to reopen her windows when she’d gone to bed. After all, there hadn’t been any trouble at all so far this summer, and so the housekeeper decided not to worry about it.
    She finished making her bed, and rapped sharply on Tag’s door before going downstairs to fix their breakfast. Of course, it would be a lot easier for her to make their breakfasts in the big kitchen of the main house, but the second Mrs. Holloway—she still thought of Phyllis that way, even after all these years—had her rules, and one was that the staff cooked for themselves.
    “The staff,” Cora snorted to herself as she began scrambling half a dozen eggs. Just like there were a lot of footmen and maids, and maybe even a butler around. Well, that had been a couple of generations back, and even Cora, at seventy-three, could barely remember those days. Now it was nothing more than a weekly cleaning crew coming in, with she herself making do from one day to the next. Still, she didn’t mind. After all, she’d been taking care of Charles Holloway since the day he was born, and she’d go on taking care of him and his children as long as she had a breath left in her.
    Thinking about Charles brought back Polly, and for a moment Cora thought she might cry. But that wouldn’t do any good at all, and if there was one thing Cora prided herself on, it was her own practicality. No, she mustn’t dwell on Polly at all. Instead, she would start thinking about Teri coming home.
    A bedroom would have to be chosen for her—maybe the nice sunny one at the northeast corner, which looked straight out over the cove.
    She paused. What was she thinking of? It wasn’t a baby who was coming back to Secret Cove in a few days. It wasa teenage girl. A girl who would certainly want to decide for herself which room she wanted.
    Her thoughts were interrupted as Tag, wearing only a pair of worn-out cutoff jeans, loped into the kitchen and sprawled on the chair. Cora eyed his clothes archly. “You planning to take another day off?” she asked.
    Tag shook his head. “I’m gonna work in the vegetable garden. Mrs. Holloway won’t even see me.”
    Cora grunted, and put a plate of food in front of her grandson, wondering, not for the first time, where his personality had come from. Certainly not from her son, who had spent almost every day of his childhood wiggling out of whatever task she assigned him. And not from his mother, either, who, as far as Cora had been able to tell, had spent most of her time in the tavern where Kirk Peterson had met her. The two of them had taken off while Tag was still an infant, leaving the baby with her “for a couple of weeks.” The weeks had stretched into months, and then years. So she’d raised Tag herself, and been pleased to find that her grandson was turning out exactly the way her son hadn’t. He worked hard, never seemed to get angry at anybody, and regarded the world with a sunny disposition that Cora thought he must