The Cradle by Patrick Somerville Read Free Book Online Page B

form of a long black plastic tube that sucked up the webs and the spiders and the spiders’
     caches of bug meat with great force. He found a stepladder in the open garage as well, and to finish the work he stood on
     it and got the highest corners; where the oldest, grubbiest webbing was, there was a white gluey paste. So old even the spiders
     didn’t go there anymore.
    When the woman returned fifteen minutes later, he’d already put the Shop-Vac and broom and ladder away. She looked at him
     from the driveway, still seated in her large brown Pontiac, and Matt heard the thoomp-pop of the trunk, and the woman said,
     “Will you get that bag outta there for me?”
    “Ma’am?”
    “I’m not playing any tricks on you,” she said. “I’ll tell you where Mary is. I can’t carry the damned thing. I only went to
     get it because you were here. Otherwise it would sit and rot in the trunk for a month.” She smiled.
    “I really would like to know,” he said, standing in her backyard with the thirty-pound bag in his arms. “I promise you I’m
     not pretending.”
    “Mary left Sturgeon Bay about three years ago,” said the woman. “Tear that open.”
    Matt lowered the bag to the ground and ripped at the corner of the plastic. As he did this, the woman went on. “To tell you
     the honest truth, I don’t know where she went. She was a strange girl.”
    “But you do strange.”
    “I do strange.”
    “Strange how?”
    “Restless.”
    “Did you ever know her sister?”
    “Which one?”
    Matt remembered that she was only Caroline’s half sister. “How many has she got?”
    “I don’t know,” said the woman. “Thirty. Forty.”
    “That’s a joke, I assume.”
    “I never laugh when I make my own jokes,” said the woman. “To me that’s ridiculous.”
    “Her name’s Caroline,” he said. “For a time her name was Caroline Francis. I’m not sure what it is now.”
    The woman, hands on her hips, nodded to a bird feeder hanging on a low branch of a maple tree. “No. Never knew her. Mary didn’t
     have many people showing up as visitors.”
    Matt raised the bag and started pouring the seed. He watched the black and white and yellow seed fill in the box behind a
     wall of plastic. “Do you know anyone who knows where Mary Landower might be?”
    The woman nodded. “I do. But do you know anything about plumbing?”

4
    If Matt went way way way way back, he could remember things. Not a lot. There was nothing before the age of five. After five,
     there was the first foster family, the Marcams. That far back, he’d been so young that he didn’t know any better than to accept
     whatever happened as the same thing that happened to everybody. And the Marcams had given him no real reason to doubt it,
     at least in the beginning. They were rich. He couldn’t remember the whole story, but later, after they’d already sent him
     back, another boy told him that Mrs. Marcam couldn’t get pregnant, and that’s why she came in and tried new kids on for size
     so often. The man had almost never been home. He was thin and fit and austere and had rarely spoken to Matt. Mrs. Marcam,
     though, had taken him everywhere, had never left his side. He’d gone shopping with her and gone to the YMCA with her and accompanied
     the Marcams on vacations—there was a beach, even, and he could remember running across it, in the sand, and holding on to
     a flat stone he’d found, running back with it to show her. There was one trip into the mountains, too, somewhere out west,
     and Matt remembered sitting on her lap on a balcony and looking out on snowcapped peaks and her leaning over him and saying,
     “This is what beautiful is.” She wore strong perfume. Once, Marissa had come home wearing something similar, and he’d gotten
     a little weak in the knees and said, “What perfume is that?” without looking at her, and she said it was something she’d gotten
     at the department store, a sample. He asked her if she’d