The Wind Chill Factor by Thomas Gifford Read Free Book Online

that should have turned them on in the second-floor hallway. Nothing happened. The lights upstairs must have been burned out. No one had used the second and third floors in a long time.
    “It’s strange being back here again,” I said. “It gives me goose pimples.”
    “I know. I haven’t been here since Cyril … brought me here. Years ago. …”
    She followed me up the long stairs Doctor Bradlee had descended thirty-four years ago with the news of my birth. It was the same now. The house never changed.
    In the hallway we stopped, accustoming our eyes to the gloom.
    “John, there’s a light down there.”
    I turned and saw the glow, the strip of light across the floor and on the wall. Something banged against the back of the house in the wind. I felt for the wall switch but it didn’t work either.
    I could hear her breathing as she followed me down the hall toward the light. The light was coming from what had been my grandfather’s bedroom. The closer I got the stranger I felt and I laughed nervously. “This is ridiculous. Why are we tiptoeing around?” We laughed in unison and she took my hand, squeezing it. Her palm was cold and damp. We went into the room together.
    My brother Cyril was sitting in one of a pair of wing-backed chairs by the windows. His eyes were closed. He had slid or tilted to one side, his head lolling down on his shoulders, left arm extended stiffly over the arm of the chair.
    “Cyril!” I shouted involuntarily.
    Paula held my arm and bit her lip. “Oh, my God—”
    It was perfectly obvious that my brother Cyril was dead.

Nine
    D OCTOR BRADLEE ARRIVED OUT OF the blowing snow an hour and a half later, stomping his feet in the hallway, complaining about the intense cold. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said as I took his heavy herringbone overcoat, “and on top of it all my car wouldn’t start, just too damned cold for man, beast, or machine. Where’s Paula? I’d better see her before I examine the deceased.” It was an odd turn of phrase: he was talking about my brother Cyril.
    Paula was sitting in the library staring into the fire. She had stopped crying and had drunk some brandy. We’d sat together in the library and waited, shocked and saddened, uneasy. My first reaction was one of curiosity rather than sorrow, actually, a result of the shock of coming upon him that way.
    I poured some brandy for myself and waited in the parlor while Bradlee tended to Paula. When he came out, his face was drawn and tired; he was not as young as he used to be. “She’ll be all right,” he said. “She’s quite strong. Awful experience for her, though. How close was she to your brother?”
    “Quite close, apparently,” I said.
    “Well,” he said, picking up his black pigskin Gladstone bag, the same one from my childhood full of rows of pill bottles, stethoscope, a blood pressure device.
    “Well, you never know, do you?” He walked out into the foyer and turned to me: “Where is he?” I nodded toward the stairs and he motioned me up, then followed.
    Bradlee stood looking at my brother’s body for a while. Cyril was wearing Levis, a white Oxford-cloth button-down shirt with the sleeves half rolled up. An identification bracelet he’d worn since his fourteenth birthday dangled from his wrist. On the table between the two wing-backed chairs stood a bottle of Courvoisier and a snifter with traces of brandy in the bottom. The bed was slightly rumpled, as if Cyril had catnapped.
    Bradlee was bending over my brother, staring into the dead eyes, pulling the lids back. He was shaking his head, touching my brother’s dead flesh. I walked across the room, stood at the window. My eyes flickered around the room, rested on the fireplace: charred remains of a fire, now cold and dead and fluttering in the downdraft. Had it been smoke I’d seen that morning after all, rising through the blowing snow?
    “How long has he been dead?” I asked.
    “Some time,” Bradlee said, eyebrows furrowed. He