Tied to the Tracks by Rosina Lippi Read Free Book Online Page B

was enough to do it, Angie in a temper or scrubbing the sink or scowling at the pages of a book. He had it bad, no question about it, and so here they were, after weeks of discussion, on their way out to meet what was left of his father’s family, and when was the last time he had done that?
     
    But the sight of Angie in the doorway made it clear that he had miscalculated, and badly.
     
    She touched a tentative finger to her hair. The hair that had first caught his attention, lifting in the wind, twirling with a life force of its own, perpetually tangled, wild, enchanted hair. Sometime between this morning and now she had cut it all off into a short shag. And if that didn’t make a clear enough statement—even in his shock, he understood that she was trying to tell him something that he was too dense to have picked up on his own—she had dyed it blue, too.
     
    If he hadn’t been running late, he told himself later, if he hadn’t been thinking about his grandfather, he would have handled it better. He would have said, Where’s your suitcase, or Let’s move, we’re going to miss the train, or even That’s a particularly stunning shade of cobalt, but none of those things had come to him. He had stood in front of her in the narrow hallway where—this is the way he would always remember it—he had had her up against the wall on more than one occasion, unable to stop long enough even to unlock the door—and opened his mouth to say the wrong thing.
     
    “Oh, no.”
     
    The tremble of her jaw gave it all away, though he didn’t realize it at that moment. It would be months before he could think about that afternoon with anything approaching objectivity, when it would finally occur to him that Angie had set him up. And by then it was too late.
     
    John got up and left his office abruptly. The sound of Angie’s voice came from the TV speakers to follow him down the hall.
     

FOUR
     
    Ogilvie, Georgia. Pop: 3,400. Est: 1820 by General Joshua Ogilvie (born 1780, Savannah), philosopher, historian, slave owner, and hero of the War of 1812. While many small southern towns went bankrupt in the sixties, Ogilvie survived and prospered, thanks primarily to its major employer, Ogilvie College, a private liberal arts university of international standing. Located on the Seaboard Coast-line Railway between Savannah, Georgia, and Jacksonville, Florida, the town is a popular destination for tourists who come to see the beautifully maintained Victorian, Georgian, and Greek Revival homes along University Parkway, the wealth of specialty and antique shops on Main Street, and the many acres of gardens and parks. The town’s Independence Day Jubilee and New Year’s Pageant are counted among the most elaborate, well organized, and worth seeing in the South.
     
     
A New History of the Oldest Coastal Towns
     
     
     
 
 
 
It’s like a terrarium,” Tony yelled. “Only bigger.” “You mean a jungle,” Rivera yelled back.
     
    The van’s air-conditioning had whimpered and died as soon as they crossed the Mason-Dixon line, and they had been shouting over road noise and wind ever since.
     
    “No, I mean a terrarium. The place looks like it’s been manicured.” Tony waved his arms to indicate the entirety of the city of Ogilvie spread out before them, which did look, Angie had to agree, like a lovingly kept garden perched in the oxbow of a river that ran toward the sea. Roofs and steeples poked up here and there but overall it was hard to make out much at all.
     
    Rivera said, “It’s only an hour to Savannah by train.”
     
    “Hey, winkie,” Angie said. “We aren’t even there yet, hold it with the big city withdrawal, okay?”
     
    Tony said, “I wouldn’t exactly call Savannah a big city, but it’ll have to do. How far is it to Jacksonville, anyway?”
     
    Rivera poked him in the shoulder and he yelped.
     
    “I was just asking.”
     
    “For Christ’s sake,” Rivera said. “There’s a whole campus of