Off Season - Jack Ketchum [3]
Except for some papers—maps, a license and registration—the glove compartment was empty. The boy with the bad skin emptied the pocketbook on the front seat and ran his long bony hands through its contents: plastic comb and brush, hairpins, a red silk scarf, lipstick, rouge, eyebrow pencil and a bottle of eyeliner, an old cloudy pocket mirror, address book, sunglasses, passport, pocket calculator, a paperback thriller, emery board, another lipstick, a wallet. Inside the wallet was a total of eighty-five dollars in tens, fives, and singles, a Bloomingdale’s charge card and credit cards from Master Charge and American Express. He flipped through the pictures in the plastic frames—a man and a woman in bathing suits, smiling into the camera; a small, strange-looking dog; an old woman cleaning a chicken in a porcelain sink, her hair in curlers. There was nothing here he wanted.
He moved his gawky adolescent body out of the car and motioned to the little boy and girl who waited behind him. The children crawled up on the seat. The boy child selected the darker of the two shades of lipstick and began scrawling circles on the rearview mirror. The girl liked the snapshot of the slightly ratlike dog and the pocket mirror and slipped them inside the grimy leather bag she wore around her neck. Meantime the big boy found a can of de-icer wedged under the seat. He shook it. Nearly empty.
He could not open the trunk because he had no crowbar. That the keys to the trunk still dangled from the ignition meant nothing to him. He did not understand keys. Only that there might be something good in there.
On their way back through the woods, they spotted an owl and waited silently while it made its kill, a large bullfrog barely visible to them above the waterline. They watched the owl return to its tree with the frog and begin to tear it apart. Then the boy with the bad skin pelted it with a rock. The rock caught the bird square in the chest and tumbled it into a patch of blackberries. The smaller children cried out in pleasure. But the boy did not bother with its carcass. The thorns were too much trouble. Some animal would come along who would not mind the thorns. At night everything hunted.
11:30 A.M.
The kitchen was beginning to please her. It would be a great kitchen, once she got it clean again. Long double-leaf table; plenty of counter space; plenty of light from the big window over the sink facing east down the mountain over the field of dying goldenrod that passed for a backyard now, and two smaller windows west and south. Best of all, a big old potbellied stove near the center of the room, big enough to heat it and probably both bedrooms as well.
The kitchen was the largest room in the house and obviously intended to be the focal point of life there. Both doors led directly into it: the back door just to the left of the sink and the front door just beyond the table, next to a huge leather sofa. It was going to be very comfortable. Carla stood back from the sink for a moment and took a look around. It looked good now. She picked up the brown paper bag filled with toweling and ashes from the stove and brought it out back to the garbage cans on the porch.
A lovely day, she thought. The sun was bright and there was just enough of a nip in the air to give her an excuse to get the stove going. In the distance she could hear the waves against the shoreline. It was too bad you couldn’t see the ocean. Just an albatross drifting high a half-mile away.
She opened the door to the woodshed and found it piled high with split oak and poplar. There was kindling in a box on the floor. Someone had done a pretty good job getting the place ready for her. Oh, it was dirty. But you had to expect that, and Carla didn’t mind a