The Fainting Room by Sarah Pemberton Strong Read Free Book Online

meaning of the word rust. A white clapboard church with a big bell in the steeple, nice maple trees. Whatever problems the people who lived here had, they could probably just sprinkle them with a little money and make them go away again.
    At least, that was how it looked from the outside.
    As she stood straddling her bike and trying to light a cigarette, the rain began, sudden and intense and very cold. By the time she had pedaled ten yards to take shelter under the nearest maple tree, she was drenched. Too wet to smoke, even. So she got back on her bike and pushed on, around the green and out Old Adams Road.
    When she found the Shepards’ house, Ingrid wiped the water from her face and stared. The house was worth staring at. It was different from all the others she’d passed, neither rambling farmhouse nor boring colonial. Her eyes ranged appreciatively over the steep roof of blue-gray slate, the wide porch detailed with gingerbread scrollwork under the eaves. There were arched stained-glass windows flanking the front door, copper downspouts etched with the turquoise patina of age. It looked to Ingrid like a house in an old movie, the kind that hid a lunatic in the attic or a body in the basement. She propped her bike against an oak tree, ran across the lawn and up onto the porch, pushed her sodden hair back from her eyes and rang the bell.
    The woman who answered the door did not go with the house at all. She looked like she’d be more at home in Southern California: mail order pastels, big gold earrings. Ingrid felt a lurch of disappointment in her stomach.
    “Mrs. Shepard?” Red hair, pancake makeup. After a pause that went on too long, during which Ingrid felt herself being looked over and found wanting, the woman smiled.
    “Yes, hi. You must be Ingrid. I was expecting you a bit later.” Mrs. Shepard looked past Ingrid to the driveway. “Where’s Liz Luce?”
    Ingrid hooked her thumbs in the back pockets of her jeans. “Mrs. Luce couldn’t come.”
    “Oh—well, come in. You’re drenched.”
    “Yeah, it’s raining,” Ingrid said, and then wished she hadn’t.
    She followed Mrs. Shepard inside and looked around. There was hand-carved scrollwork on the post thing at the bottom of the stairs, a very old mirror built into more carved paneling beside the front door. The antique brass door hinges with an inlaid pattern of fleurs-de-lys. Old things, well made. Whoever had built this house had cared about what they were doing, had intended it to last a long time. Through an archway Ingrid glimpsed a living room filled with books, a fireplace and a worn brown velvet sofa with wooden legs that looked like lion’s paws. She imagined stretching out on the sofa after everyone else was asleep and reading. The image pleased her.
    “This is a cool house,” she offered.
    “Let me just see where Ray is,” Mrs. Shepard said. “Why don’t you go on in the living room there. Here, take off that sweater, and I’ll get you a towel.”
    Ingrid hesitated, then peeled off her sweater. Beneath it she wore a black Minor Threat tee shirt whose collar and sleeves she’d cut away with some very dull scissors. She felt Mrs. Shepard’s eyes on her and wished for a moment that she’d worn more regular-looking clothes. Then she shook away the feeling and wished instead for a cigarette—if the Shepards weren’t going to like her, it was better to find out now.
     
    In the kitchen, Evelyn threw Ingrid’s dripping sweater across the back of a chair and spread a dishtowel beneath it so the floor wouldn’t get wet. This was the girl who was going to save her from doing something even crazier than throwing a rock at her husband’s head? This girl, with hair sticking out from her head every which way, with clothes so ragged even a church poor box wouldn’t want them, this girl with a safety pin in her ear, this girl who showed up wringing wet a whole hour early? This girl was not going to make her life any easier. She hadn’t