Two Tall Tails by Sofie Kelly Read Free Book Online

me.”
    Rose was one of my grandmother’s friends. Barely five feet tall with short white hair and kind gray eyes, she also lived in one of the apartments in the house and worked for me at my repurpose shop, Second Chance. In theory, living so close together shouldn’t have worked, but it did. We gave each other lots of space—in truth, Rose had way more of a social life than I did. And she was even having some success in teaching me how to cook, something no one else had been able to do.
    Tom took a step forward and craned his neck to get a better look at the cat. He was a small, round man, no taller than five eight or so, with thick iron gray hair and small black frame glasses.
    â€œI think you’re right,” he said. “And while I generally like to take a ‘live and let live’ approach to other creatures, if that happens to be the vole that made several meals of my hyacinth bulbs, I can’t say I’m sorry.”
    Rose nudged me again. “Stop scratching,” she said softly, a warning edge in her voice.
    She’d seen me trying to wedge a finger under the splint on my left arm. I’d dropped a cardboard box full of old elementary school readers on that arm, injuring a tendon in the palm of my hand a couple of weeks earlier. I had to wear the plastic and neoprene splint for another two weeks and it was driving me crazy. It itched. A lot. Rose had already caught me trying to jam my toothbrush underneath the splint to get some relief. She’d confiscated the toothbrush and I’d gotten a stern speech about mouth germs, skin infections and the four stitches at the base of my thumb. Then she’d given me a bowl of warm rhubarb crisp as a distraction from the itching.
    I made a face at her now and she made one right back at me before gently squeezing my arm.
    I tucked a strand of hair that had slipped free from my ponytail behind my ear and looked over at Tom’s yard, trying to shift my attention away from the sensation that ants were marching in formation up my wrist. Tom’s lawn was probably the most perfectly manicured one in North Harbor, Maine. Maybe even in the entire state. No weeds dared poke their heads up in the two planters that flanked the front door and ran the length of the house on either side. Tom had replaced the bulbs that had been eaten by the voles with little clay pots of daffodils and paper whites and today had started replacing those with white and pink geraniums.
    The grass around his small, gray-shingled story-and-a-half house was mowed to a length of precisely an inch and three-quarters, which Tom deemed the correct height for that particular type of grass. The only incongruity was the small strip of lawn that separated his driveway from the yard of his neighbor, Angie Bates. There the grass had been sheared so short in places there was nothing but bare earth.
    Tom followed my gaze. “How can that miscreant be Angie’s family?” he asked.
    I didn’t think he really wanted an answer to the question. “He’ll be leaving soon, and Angie will be home,” I said.
    The old man gave a snort of derision, and the color rose in his face. “I’m not convinced that ne’er-do-well is even employed. He’s extremely evasive. Even Angie wasn’t clear on what he does for a living, assuming he does anything.” He looked toward the small white Cape Cod–style house on the other side of the choppy strip of grass.
    Angie—Angelica Bates—was an anthropologist who taught part-time in the Environmental Education Department at Unity College. The “he” Tom was speaking so derisively about was her nephew, Jason. Angie had no children. She was a bit of a free spirit with a wild mass of long blond curls streaked with gray and her dark-framed glasses always slipping down her nose. When she wasn’t teaching, she was off somewhere in the world on a dig site. I’d taken two classes from