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

and respect—no favorites and no scapegoats. She wouldn’t teach on the island—they wouldn’t hire her anyway, not Mary Bethany, the outsider. She’d pictured a classroom of maybe third-graders up where her father was from. They’d gone there once when she had been about seven. The potato fields were in bloom and she thought the wide openness of it all was beautiful She’d miss the ocean, but it would be a change. A good change.
    His second attack was much worse than the first and he’d had to have an operation in Bangor. After that, there was no question of working. He sold his cows and most of the farm equipment, and leased the fields to the Harveys. He seemed to disappear right before Mary’s eyes, shrinking into his clothes until he hardly looked like a grown man. He’d never had time to get interested in any hobbies and hadn’t been a reader. He sat in the parlor and watched the television Martha had brought with her when she’d come to see them after he was released from the hospital. “It’s cheaper thana nursing home,” she’d told Mary, who had been surprised by the gift. They’d never had a television and her mother had always made disparaging remarks about the crop of antennae that sprouted from island roofs. “Put him in front of it in the morning and turn it off when you put him to bed at night,” Martha instructed.
    It was a depressing notion, but Mary had found that Martha had been right and her father was content to sit and watch day in and day out. He even seemed to enjoy certain shows, occasionally shouting out answers when Wheel of Fortune was on.
    Anne Bethany’s schedule continued without the slightest variation. She rose before dawn, tended her chickens and the garden in season. She made meals her husband didn’t eat. She was in bed and asleep at eight thirty. She wasn’t interested in becoming a nurse and made it clear to Mary that taking care of her father was her job—a job in exchange for room and board now that she was an adult.
    Mary had had no choice, and wouldn’t have abandoned her parents and the farm even if she had. Martha called once in a while, but after that one trip, kept her distance.
    So, Mary had stayed. Maybe if she had been more outgoing, more self-confident like Martha, she would have fit into island life better—or had the guts to leave, parents or no parents. The years went by and late one afternoon her father died quietly in front of the TV. Mary had gone in to offer him some broth. Vanna White was turning over Ts.
    The farm had been paid off a few years before Mr. Bethany’s illness, so Mary and her mother had had enough to get by, especially after Mary started running a small B and B during the summer months to pay the mounting shorefront taxes. Her mother had taken her father’s death as a personal affront and, after several years of intense anger, joined him, presumably to give him what for. That had been ten years ago.
    Mary was alone. There was no lover past, present, or future. When she considered the complications love presented—gleaned from her reading and from observing those around her—she was usually glad to have been spared the bother. But it did mean she couldn’t pass the baby off as hers.
    Gradually, as the sky lightened, she had come up with a plan. Easy enough to say that Christopher was her grandnephew, that his mother couldn’t take care of him. Although Martha hadn’t been on the island since her mother’s funeral, it was well known that she had had ten children herself and that those ten had been equally fruitful and multiplied. Mary invented a rich tale of a young niece with three children already, abandoned by her good-for-nothing cheater of a husband, driving through the night to leave the baby after calling her aunt in desperation.
    â€œCould you take him for a while? Just till I get my feet on the ground?”
    Mary