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

find out. The upstairs of the house wasn’t heated. In the winter Martha and Mary had slept under a mountain of quilts, often waking to frost on the inside of the window. But a slim chance was still a chance and Mary knew what would happen to Pip if he was discovered.
    So, she’d had to move Pip outdoors, bringing milk when she could and hoping he’d survive on what he could find in the woods. He grew into a fine orange tiger and always came when she called, leaping at her and rubbing up against her leg, leaving his scent, marking her for him to find again and again. When she stroked him, he purred so loudly he sounded like her father’s table saw.
    Late that fall, she’d carried him to the cat lady’s house. She had a name, but everybody just called her “the cat lady,” because she must have had more than thirty of them. Mary had knocked on her door, opened it, and pushed Pip in. He was promptly greeted by a chorus of yowls. Then she dashed to the side of the house and stayed there, looking around the corner from behind a lilac bush, until she was sure the cat lady hadn’t taken an unaccountable dislike to Pip, tossing him out the way he’d come in.
    After that Mary didn’t rescue another kitten, another Pip. It wasn’t for lack of desire—she couldn’t bear to give one up again.
    The birthday party. Before Martha left home, Mary had always been invited to the parties of the girls in her class. Wonderful parties. Cakes with pink sugar roses, balloons, and always a little bag filled with candy and a prize to take home. She still had a barrette with a butterfly on it that had been in one of those bags. There had been games and she’d been good at them—three-legged races, pin the tail on the donkey. She’d never had her own party, but one year Martha and a boyfriend who had a car took her to the Tastee-Freez off-island for ice cream on her birthday. On the way back they’d stopped at a yard sale and that’s where Mary got her Charles Dickens books. Martha had said she could have fifty cents to spend on anything she wanted. The set of books was a dollar, but Martha talked the woman down, pointing out nobody else but “my nutty little sister” would want the “moldy old things.”
    Once Martha was gone, the party invitations had stopped coming. A lot of things stopped. There was no one to watch the Fourth of July parade with or the fireworks over the harbor later that night. Mr. and Mrs. Bethany weren’t interested in things like that. “A farmer can’t take a day off, no matter how independent he is,” her father had said, which was as close as he got to making a joke. Her mother said nothing.
    So Mary was used to not being invited places. When she’d collected the mail from their box on the main road the other day on her way home from school, she’d been startled to see a small, bright purple envelope with her name on it in unfamiliar script writing. Martha always printed. When she opened it, she knew immediately Vi’s mother must have made her send it. Even before overhearing the girls talk, Mary had planned to make a polite refusal. She just hadn’t been able to find a time yet when the house was empty, so she could use the phone. Most days it seemed no one was around, busy outdoors. Now when she had a call to make, either her mother or father was always in the kitchen. She was going to tell Vi’s mother she was needed at the farm. That she appreciated the thought, but she was needed.
    Mary had repeated the phrase to herself several times. She liked the sound of it. “I’m needed at home.”
    As it had turned out, Mary was needed at home. Her father’s first heart attack came just as she’d begun to think she could move off-island, get some kind of job, and take courses at UMaine. She’d decided to be a teacher. A teacher who would treat all her students with the same kindness