Aurora 04 - The Julius House Read Online Free PDF

“but I’ve got your gift, and I want to give it to you tonight.”
    “I have your gift, too,” I said. We laughed a little. We were both nervous about this exchange.
    I supposed he’d gotten me a diamond bracelet, or a new car—something costly and wonderful—
    but I never expected a real surprise. He reached in his coat and pulled out a legal envelope.
    He’d changed his will? Gee, how romantic. I disengaged my hand and took the envelope, trying to make my face blank so he wouldn’t read disappointment. I slid a sheaf of stiff paper out, unfolded it, and began reading, trying to force comprehension. Suddenly it came.
    I now owned the Julius house.
    I felt tears in my eyes. I hated that; my nose turns red, my eyes get bloodshot, it messes up my eye makeup. But whether I wanted to or not, my eyes began to leak down my face.
    “You know how much this means to me,” I said very quietly. “Thank you, Martin.” I picked up my huge cloth napkin and gently patted my face. Then I fished my own legal envelope out of my purse and shoved it across the table. He opened it with much the same apprehensive look I must have had. He scanned the first page and looked away, over the heads of the other diners, blinking.
    “How’d you do it?” he asked finally.
    I told him, and he laughed in a choky way when I talked about my representation of myself as a religious cultist. But he kept looking away, and I knew he would not look at me for fear of crying.
    “Let’s go,” he said suddenly, and groping for his wallet, threw some money on the table.
    We got out the door, adroitly dodging the young woman with the reservations book, who clearly wanted to ask us what was wrong. I put my arm around Martin’s waist, and his arm snaked around me, and I went across the gravel parking lot pretty briskly for a short woman wearing heels. Of course Martin wouldn’t forgo opening my door for me, though I had often reminded him I had functioning arms, and by the time he had gotten in his side, he was really breathless from trying to tamp the emotion back down inside. I turned around in the seat to face him and slid my arms around him. Sometimes I am very glad I am small. His arms went around me ferociously. He was crying.

    My husband-to-be handed me the keys to our house the next morning.
    “Go see it. Make some plans,” he said, knowing that was exactly what I wanted to do. I was pleased to be going by myself, and he knew that, too.
    I showered and pulled on blue jeans and a short-sleeved tee, slapped on some makeup, stuck in some earrings, tied my sneakers, and drove a mile north of town.
    The Julius house lay across open fields from Lawrence-ton, the fields usually planted in cotton. As I’d pointed out to Martin, you could see my mother’s subdivision from the house—if you went to the very back of the yard, out of the screen of trees the original owner had planted around the whole property, which was about an acre.
    A family named Zinsner had built the house originally, about sixty years ago. When the second Mrs. Zinsner had been widowed, she’d sold the house for a song to the Julius family.
    (“No realtor,” my mother had sniffed.)
    The Julius family had lived in the house for a few months six years ago. They had renovated it. T. C. Julius had added an apartment over the garage for Mrs. Julius’s mother. They had enrolled their daughter in the local high school.
    Then they had vanished.
    No one had seen the Juliuses since the windy fall day when Mrs. Julius’s mother had come over to the house to cook breakfast for the rest of the family, only to find them all gone.
    The wind was blowing today, too, sweeping quietly across the newly planted fields, a spring wind with a bite to it. The trustee for the estate, a Mrs. Totino, Martin had told me, had had the yard mowed from time to time and kept the house in decent shape to discourage vandals and gossip. It had been rented out occasionally.
    Today the yard was full of weeds, tall