Spirit by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page A

given them a particularly vile cough-candy and patted them so hard on the top ofthe head that her wedding ring had clonked against their skulls.
    Johnson Ward reached the porch and he was big and smiling and twinkly-eyed and he stamped his feet and banged his leather gloves together.
    â€˜Johnson,’ said father. He looked quite small by comparison, almost as if he had shrunk in the wash. Johnson Ward took off his glove and squeezed father’s hand tight, and then clapped him on the back.
    â€˜Hullo, David. I hope you don’t object to my coming. Michael Farkas told me what had happened. I’m really so sorry. Your little Peggy was a dream come true.’
    â€˜Yes, she was,’ said father. ‘Yes. We’re going to miss her.’
    â€˜And this must be Lizzie,’ said Johnson Ward. He took off his hat, and when he took off his hat, Elizabeth saw that he wasn’t so very old. His hair was the shiny light-brown colour of peanut-brittle, and neatly combed into a parting. He had a peanut-brittle coloured moustache, too. His face was broad and generous and friendly, with an easy smile and a captivating way of crinkling up his eyes. He reminded Elizabeth of Clark Gable, sort of, except that he was taller and heavier, and his ears didn’t stick out, as Laura always said, ‘like the kitchen cupboard with its doors wide open.’
    â€˜How do you do, sir,’ said Elizabeth, in a whisper.
    Johnson Ward squatted down in the porch so that his coat-tails dragged in the snow. He was very
clean
, with a crisp white collar, and he smelled of cigars and spices.
    â€˜You don’t have to call me “sir”,’ he told her, taking hold of both of her hands. ‘We’re friends, you and me, even if you don’t know it. The last time I saw you was when your baby sister was born, and you were four. Do you know what we did?’
    â€˜No, sir,’ said Elizabeth.
    â€˜Well, I’ll tell you what we did, we spent the whole afternoon in the garden popping balloons, that’s what we did. Wejumped on them. We sat on them. We pricked them with pins. We even bit them, do you know that? Now, that’s what I call brave, biting a balloon. But there’s one thing I’ll never forget; and that is, what a lady you were. Even at four, you were a lady, and I can see today that you’re still a lady; and that you always will be.’
    Elizabeth didn’t know what to say. She remembered bursting the balloons but she didn’t remember Johnson Ward. All the same, Johnson Ward grasped her hands warmly and tightly, and she decided she liked him. Elizabeth’s father said, rather sharply, ‘Say thank you to Mr Ward, Lizzie.’
    â€˜Thank you, Mr Ward,’ Elizabeth whispered.
    â€˜No, no, thank you,
Bronco
,’ Johnson Ward insisted.
    Elizabeth hesitated. How could a grown-up writer with a Cadillac and a moustache call himself ‘Bronco’? That was a cowboy’s name; a name that little boys used, in schoolyard games.
    â€˜Come on, now,’ Johnson Ward urged her.
    Elizabeth swallowed. The cold draught had made her throat feel dry. ‘Thank you, Bronco,’ she told him.
    Father closed the front door and Johnson Ward took off his heavy coat. ‘I’ll bet you miss your little sister sorely,’ he said.
    Elizabeth nodded. Most of the time she didn’t find it too difficult to think that Peggy was dead. But now and then, for no particular reason, her eyes would fill with tears, and her throat would tighten up, and her voice would sound as if she had a thistle stuck in her larynx – that’s if she could speak at all. At those times, she felt a cold and blasphemous suspicion that Peggy wasn’t in Heaven, after all; that she wasn’t sitting on some sun-blessed cumulus cloud, with white wings and a white nightgown and a golden halo around her head. At those times, she suspected that Peggy had simply left them for