Strange Sisters by Fletcher Flora Read Free Book Online Page B

trees on which there was an early hint of foliage, an almost invisible tinge of emerging chlorophyll. They crossed the western limit of the small town and walked for perhaps a quarter of a mile along the shoulder of a farm-to-market road. The shoulder was spongy from the rain that had fallen, but it was not muddy, being covered with a mat of heavy brown dead grass left over from the last warm days of the year before. Eventually they left the shoulder and cut at an angle across a pasture toward the long wavering stand of scrub timber that marked the course of West Creek. As they walked, the sun, already far down toward the horizon in its descent of the sky, broke through a cluster of clouds and touched with cold white fire the gray remnants of rain and the drab wet growth of earth. It was all at once an expanded world, still and shimmering and incredibly delicate, and Kathy felt within the close confinement of her ribs a vast swelling of pain and pleasure that she thought must surely burst the slender bones.
    She closed her eyes, wanting to cry out in hurting ecstasy, and she wished with all her heart that Stella were here to share the shining world. If only it were Stella beside her instead of this ridiculous, bumbling, offensive boy. By keeping her eyes closed, stepping carefully to avoid stumbling in her self-imposed blindness, she almost managed to convince herself that it was true, that it was indeed Stella beside her and that there was no such person as Kenny Renowski to defile the purity of the new world that the sun had casually created in the last hour before it disappeared.
    They crossed the pasture and descended a gentle slope through trees to the bank of the narrow, sluggish creek. And there in the shadows of the trees beside the muddy water, her brief, bright, spun-glass world shattered and fell in silence and lay around her in countless jagged and menacing shards. At first, for a few seconds, she was so frozen, so paralyzed by the violence of her reaction, that she made no protest whatever, and her passivity was mistaken for submission. Then, in an instant, she was a sobbing, clawing fury in fierce and disproportionate retaliation to his mild and harmless aggression. Her vision was impaired by a thick, swirling mist, and the first thing she saw clearly after vision was restored was his clawed, bleeding, terrified face.
    Turning, she ran. Wildly, still sobbing, she fled up the slope through the trees and back across the pasture to the road, and though she stopped there on the shoulder to recover her breath and quiet the rampant beating of her heart, she had in a way never stopped at all, had run on and on for a long time over a long way from one bleeding face to another. A long time and a long way from Kenny Renowski to Angus Brunn.
     

Chapter 4
    A bruptly, she stood up and left the counter. Making her way to the rear of the store, she stood waiting outside the door of an occupied telephone booth, caught fast for a moment between the opposing forces of a suddenly recurring need to contact Jacqueline and an oppressive uncertainty of the wisdom of it. She looked at her wrist watch and saw that it was after nine o'clock. Jacqueline would have left her apartment long ago, would have completed by this time the trip from the apartment to the downtown department store in which she was employed as a personnel manager. She was at this moment, no doubt, sitting behind the huge blond desk with the ivory-colored telephone on it over which Kathy had first seen her and over which the intangible line of communication and understanding had established itself between them from the first moment as surely as it could have been established by spoken words over the telephone itself.
    Jacqueline liked ivory. The color, that is. Pale, cold ivory. She surrounded herself with it in the restricted places of her private life, and added a touch here and there, wherever it was possible, in the public areas. For instance, except for the