The Little Woods by McCormick Templeman Read Free Book Online

it. I tried to read my detective novel, but my stomach couldn’t manage the curves. I folded back the corner of my page and opened my window, drinking in the fresh pine scent.
    “You’re going to love Richard. Isn’t she going to love Richard, Noel?” Helen, all sparkling and perfect, turned around to smile at me.
    “Who’s Richard?”
    “Our father. He’s amazing. And Magda’s okay too,” Noel said.
    “Magda’s a bore.”
    Magda, I surmised, was the mother, and she was waiting for us in the driveway when we pulled up. Little more than an afterthought when set beside her daughters, she had wan orange hair that she wore swept up. Richard Slater was young and terribly good-looking. He wore a tailored Italian suit, and he flashed me a smile before being tackle-hugged by his daughters. I was left staring at Magda.
    “You must be Cally,” she said as if my name tasted sour. “Welcome. Welcome.”
    She took me by the arm and led me into the house, a modernist spectacle, several stories tall with steep gray steps that led down to a boathouse and then to moody gray water below. Despite its mass, the house was warm and open, with light streaming through windows and flowers bursting forth from most surfaces. Something involving birds of paradise and purple hyacinths awaited us in the loggia.
    Magda took a seat on the daisy-print sofa and motioned for me to sit beside her. She turned her rigid body toward me and appraised me like she might a new set of pearls.
    “So the girls tell me you’re from Oregon. We’re from San Francisco, of course, this is just our little vacation spot, but we do love it.”
    “It’s really beautiful here, and your house is … wow.”
    “Thank you,” she said, leaning forward, dimpled chin on ruddy knuckles. “I hope you’re adjusting to boarding school. I know it can be a bit of a shock. What do your parents do up in Portland?”
    “Um,” I said, shifting in my seat. “My mom’s between jobs.”
    “I see. And your father?”
    I tried to swallow over the lump in my throat, to push my way past the familiar longing in my chest.
    “He died when I was seven.”
    A perfunctory gasp from Magda. “My condolences, of course.”
    “Heart attack,” I said like a child who’d memorized words she didn’t understand.
    “Well,” she said, patting my knee, but then it was clear she had nothing else to say. Wrapping a blue cardigan around bird shoulders, she stood abruptly. “We should find the girls. I’m going to go check the toiletries. You head into the kitchen. I’m sure they’re in there, getting into the wine already.” And with that she disappeared around a corner and shut a door behind her.
    I walked along the hall, my Converse squeaking on the red baked tile. The twins were not in the kitchen but another girl was. She smoked and seemed to fairly drip off the counter on which she sat. She was oddly, disconcertingly beautiful in a way that made no sense. Her hair was an ugly grayish blond, more gray than blond. Her lips, too full and caked with cherry-red matte, were shaped by nature and accentuated by character into a brutal pout, and her skin was nearly translucent.
    “You’re the roommate,” she said, her voice a little too nasal. “I’m the neighbor.”
    “Hi.”
    “I’m Chelsea … Vetiver. Chelsea Vetiver. I tell you that because people say I don’t make sense unless you know both mynames. What do you do, anyway?” she asked, slipping off the counter.
    I laughed but saw that she was serious.
    “I’m in school. I’m seventeen.”
    “Well, so am I, but that doesn’t, like, define me.” She opened the fridge and stared distantly at some item within. “Okay, so you don’t do anything now, but what do you want to do with yourself?”
    “Like when I grow up? I don’t know.” I shrugged and thought about the book I’d been reading. “I guess I’d kind of like to be a private detective, you know, like Philip Marlowe. Like in those