The Body in the Sleigh by Katherine Hall Page Read Free Book Online

and Mary had had to keep their clothes clean for as long as Mary could remember. After Martha was gone, this was another thing she sometimes forgot too.
    In the summer it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered during the summer—that glorious gift of total freedom. Mary swam in the ocean and rinsed the salt off in the warm fresh-water stream that ran beside the meadow marking the end of their property. They had a saltwater farm, right on the sea; but nature had decided to give thema bonus—the wide stream and the well it fed provided them with a seemingly endless supply of pure, sweet water.
    Martha had come home only once, two years after she left. She’d announced she was getting married to a Mr. Hutchins and they’d be living near his people in New Hampshire. Before she left, she took Mary to Ellsworth and bought her a set of underpants with the names of the week on them, two skirts, a pair of jeans, several tops, and a beautiful white blouse with lace on the collar. Also new shoes, sneakers, and socks. Mary had been dazed by the sudden influx of garments and even more dazed by the information Martha imparted about a “friend coming to visit” each month one of these days, by and by. When the “friend” duly arrived, Mary had been profoundly grateful to bossy Martha and had thought of writing to her, but they’d been sticking to cards at their birthdays and Christmas, so she’d left it at that. Martha had also yelled at her the moment she saw her about those weekly baths, demanded she go scrub herself clean, and Mary had taken that to heart too. Vi and the others had no right to say Mary was dirty now.
    She missed her sister. She missed her soft breathing in the other bed at night. The bed was still in the room, but empty and destined to stay so. Mary had heard her mother refer to Mary as a “mistake” often enough to know there wouldn’t be another one to join her.
    Martha would have known what to do about Vi, Patsy, and the other girls in Mary’s class. The island was a pretty small place and there weren’t a whole lot of choices when it came to friends, especially since each grade didn’t have many students. When Mary had been little, she’d played with Doug Harvey, whose family owned the adjoining farm, but starting in first grade they’d been teased so much about being boyfriend and girlfriend that they had barely spoken to each other for years.
    When Martha left, Mary had begged her father to let her have one of the barn kittens as a house cat, but he’d been firm. They were farm animals same as the rest and their sole job was to keepthe rodent population down. When the feline numbers got too big, he’d take a litter, put them in a sack with some rocks, and throw them into the cove. Mary had watched and waited. The next time she saw him head in that direction with his cargo, she’d followed, silently slipping through the pines. As soon as he’d disappeared back up the path, she’d run straight into the freezing water, dove under, and grabbed at the burlap. She sputtered to shore and cut the string with the penknife she’d brought. Miraculously, one of the tiny creatures was still alive and she’d put it under her shirt for warmth and gone straight into the woods to her fort—a deep fissure between two granite ledges that she’d roofed with blowdowns and pine boughs. She knew what to do and fed the kitten milk with an eyedropper. Later she’d taken the drowsy ball of fluff up to her room and kept him there until he was weaned. Him. The kitten turned out to be a he and she named him Pip, because she had great expectations for him. Mary was glad Pip was a he and not a she. A she would have had kittens and then what would Mary have done? She wished she could have kept Pip in her room longer, but she didn’t dare—although, since her parents slept off the kitchen, there was only a slim chance they’d