Cover of Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

and you in it.” Caught up in his enthusiasm for his game, he ran back to their room.
    Cate was torn between amusement at his Elmer Fudd pronunciation and puzzlement at his word choice. Barricade ? Where had he come up with that ? Maybe they’d been watching old westerns on television; she needed to keep a closer watch on their entertainment.
    She checked the dining room: it was empty; the morning rush was over. After she and Sherry cleaned the dining room and kitchen and Mr. Layton returned to get his things, she could change the sheets on the bed and clean the room, then she’d have the rest of the day to get things ready for her mother’s visit.
    Mr. Harris had left. Going over to help with the dishes, Cate bumped her hip against Sherry’s. “So, what’s up with you and Mr. Harris? Is there something going on between you two?”
    Sherry’s mouth fell open, and she gave Cate a look of absolute astonishment. “Good God, no. What gave you that idea?”
    Her reaction was so genuine that Cate felt foolish for having jumped to the wrong conclusion. “He was talking to you.”
    “Well, hell,
Cal
talks to a lot of people.”
    “Not that I’ve seen, he doesn’t.”
    “He’s just a little shy,” Sherry said, in what was probably the understatement of the month. “Besides, I’m old enough to be his mother.”
    “You are not—unless you were really, really precocious.”
    “Okay, so that’s an exaggeration. I do like
Cal
—a lot. He’s a smart man. He might not have a college degree, but he can fix just about anything.”
    Cate agreed with that. Whatever needed repair at the B and B, from carpentry to electrical work to plumbing, Mr. Harris handled it. He also filled in as a mechanic, if need be. If ever anyone had been born to be a handyman, Mr. Harris had been.
    Ten years before, fresh out of college with her degree in marketing, she would have disdained people who did physical work—people with their names sewn on their pockets, as they had been described in her circle—but she was older and wiser now, she hoped. The world needed all types to make things work, from the planners to the doers, and in this little community someone who could fix things was worth his weight in gold.
    She began cleaning the dining room while Sherry finished in the kitchen; then she vacuumed and dusted downstairs—at least in all the public areas. Thank goodness the huge old Victorian had two parlors. The front one, the big one, was for use by her guests. The small one in back was the den where she and the boys relaxed in the evenings, where they watched television and played games. She didn’t bother even picking up their toys in there; for one thing, her mother wasn’t due for hours yet and the boys would have their things dragged out again before she got here, so Cate didn’t waste the effort.
    Sherry poked her head out of the kitchen door. “All through in here. I’ll see you in the morning. Hope your mom gets here okay.”
    “Thanks. I do, too; she’ll never let me hear the end of it if she has car trouble or something.”
    Trail Stop was so remote that there was no easy way to get there, no nearby airports for commercial flights, and only one road in. Because her mother hated the small propeller planes she could have flown on to get closer, and because renting any sort of vehicle at their tiny landing strip was almost “mission impossible,” she chose to fly into Boise, where she knew there would be rentals available. That made for a long drive and yet another sore point with her concerning Cate’s chosen home. She didn’t like having her daughter and grandsons living in another state, she didn’t like
Idaho
—give her a metropolitan area over a rural one any day—and she didn’t like the inordinate trouble it took her to visit. She didn’t like it that Cate had bought a B and B, which meant she seldom had any free time; in fact, Cate had visited her parents only once since buying the B and B.
    All of those