Tremble by Tobsha Learner Read Free Book Online Page A

standing beside the door, pretended not to hear.
    “They confiscated it as evidence, then returned it later. It’s stored in a safety deposit box at the Abbey National Bank in Tunbridge Wells.”
    “Good. I think both your aunt and I owe you an explanation.” Her voice was mesmeric. Dorothy felt as if she was being hypnotized into listening.
    “I am also an Owen; in fact, your second cousin once removed. Like yourself and Winifred, I have never married. Most of us don’t, preferring to take the mandrake as husband instead. This tradition has gone back for hundreds of years. It all began with the hanging of Llewelyn the Fierce.”
    Dorothy shuddered, struggling with a suffocating sense of historybeing cyclical. “The same Llewelyn that was hanged from the walls of Shrewsbury Castle?” she ventured, finally finding enough saliva to articulate.
    “The very same, executed by the vile tyrant Lord Huntington. They left Llewelyn hanging there for three nights and three days. By the time Gwen Owen came to claim his body the crows had already picked out his beautiful black eyes.”
    Dorothy’s blood ran cold. “Gwen Owen? Was she—”
    “Llewelyn’s mistress—yes, child, she was. An extraordinary human being and a wondrous sorceress. When she came to that cold wall and stared upon the body of her only love she did not shed one tear. Instead she swore to avenge herself on all future generations of Huntingtons, even if it took centuries. She then bent down and looked for the patch of earth where poor Llewelyn must have spilled his seed as he died. The mandrake root was already growing at the foot of the gallows. Gwen cleared the soil around it and harvested it carefully, gently pulling the root away and placing it beside her breast. From that day onward Llewelyn’s mandrake root was handed down the Owen line. So you see, your mandrake root was just carrying out its destiny, taking revenge on a Huntington. Its actions were the culmination of the very reason for his existence. Gwen finally had her revenge.”
    The woman paused and reached into her handbag for a peppermint.
    Dorothy tried to control the tears welling up in her eyes. “A man died!”
    In refusing the offered mint, Dorothy knocked the tin from the woman’s hand. Peppermints flew everywhere. The woman ignored them. Her face softened and she stroked Dorothy’s hand again.
    “Winifred should have warned you. But she was just thinking of your happiness.” She peered down at Dorothy’s hand. “You have a profound future, your magic lies in the Word.”
    “So how is all that information going to help me now?”
    “It won’t, but write the story anyway. It’s time we Owens were immortalized.” She left with a swirl of her long skirt.
    Dorothy watched her go. Behind her, framed by the barred window, a fleeting shadow flew past. Set against the gathering night sky, it might have been a wild black-maned man entangled in the arms of his laughing mistress; then again it might not.

Rainmaker
     
     
    T he tumbleweed twisted in the hot breeze as it rolled down Sandridge’s main street. It caught on the bleached stone steps of the church, then, as if disgruntled with the breaking of its flight, curled around a bent Coke can.
    The tightly knit farming community was in its thirteenth month without rain and the wheat crop, visible beyond rusty barbed-wire fencing, was withered and sparse.
    The gas-station owner, a skeptical man in his midfifties, looked up from his caramel milkshake and out through the window of the diner. Across the street the thin-faced widow everyone knew as Gracie was already peeping out from behind her nylon curtains. They both watched as a brand new Ford Bronco, gleaming in the sun, turned into the main street. It was the first visitor the farming community had seen for months, and this was a town that distrusted strangers.
    The Ford Bronco itself was unremarkable, except that it was pulling a 1960s Airstream trailer. The silver oblong with