Cry Baby Hollow Read Online Free PDF Page A

said.
    “I noticed,” she told him.
    He looked at her expectantly.
    “I don’t have a key,” she explained.
    Realization dawned on him.
    “That’s why you slept in your car!”
    She nodded.
    “I didn’t think Vina would be very happy if I woke her up to get one.”
    He gave her a knowing look. “That’s an understatement,” he assured her, “but you could a come back and got mine,” he told her, pulling out his keys. “You knew I wasn’t asleep yet.”
    “You have a key?”
    “I told you I helped Vina get it set up for you,” he reminded her. “And anyway, even if I didn’t have a key you could a come to my place to sleep,” he said, sticking his beer into one of the cargo pockets and sorting through the fifty keys on his ring.
    “I don’t make a habit of bunking down with strange men.”
    “I wasn’t implyin’ anything,” he assured her. “My dinette folds into a spare bed.” He selected a key and opened the door. Stepping inside, he held it open while she followed him.
    She walked in past him and let out an involuntary gasp.
    The cabin had been built during her mother’s Asian Modern period. It was a perfectly square building with a steeply pitched, pyramidal roof with a little windowed copula at the peak. The wall facing the street was solid, but all the others were composed of sliding glass doors set one after another with thick cedar pillars in between. The interior was open, but areas around the perimeter could be sectioned off with shoji screens that glided along on tracks. The only truly private spaces were along the back wall. There, the perimeter housed a tiny kitchenette, a bathroom, and a utility closet. The center of the room had a sunken conversation pit with a huge, stone fireplace and above that, surrounded by the glass cupola, was a small loft.
    “It’s beautiful,” she breathed.
    The floors had been refinished, the paper in the screens replaced, and the built in sofas in the pit had been recovered in a heavy, off white fabric. Glancing into the kitchen, she saw all new appliances in gleaming stainless steel.
    “Vina said you’d be working from home, so we made a little office.” He pointed to one of the screened off areas where a desk sat ready for her laptop. “What is it you do?”
    “I run an internet store,” she told him, looking around in awe.
    “Oh yeah,” he remembered. “A toy store, right?”
    “Actually I sell new and used board games, most of them antique, rare, or foreign.”
    “Aren’t board games toys?” He asked.
    She nodded noncommittally.
    “I guess you’ll be spending a lot of time in the library then,” he observed. “We don’t get cable out here and we sure don’t get internet.”
    “I’m having a satellite system installed,” she told him and then realized that she would need to call her movers and the satellite people and change the address.
    “There’s a queen sized mattress up in the loft,” he pointed. “But we had to get a real low frame so you wouldn’t smack your head every time you sat up. Vina said that was your favorite part of the cabin and I figured that’s where you’d want it. We could move the bed down there and put the desk up there if you want, but it was kind of a bitch to get up there.”
    “No,” she told him, craning her neck to look into the loft. “It’s perfect just the way it is.”
    “You haven’t seen the best part,” Joe told her. He opened the bathroom door with a flourish.
    The old tile floor had been ripped out and replaced with slate, and in the corner there was a large Japanese soaking tub with little teak stairs leading up to it. The room also had a toilet, bidet, double vanity with basin sinks and a slate tiled shower stall with glass walls.
    “It’s amazing,” she told him. “It wasn’t this nice when it was new.”
    “Thanks,” he said. “I’m pretty handy.”
    She looked at him, surprised.
    “You did all this?”
    He shrugged.
    “Vina did most of the picking out but she