Her Dear and Loving Husband Read Online Free PDF

she had to keep moving even when she didn’t want to. When she slowed down, even for a moment, odd, unclear thoughts occurred to her, and she didn’t want to try to make sense of them. She wanted to sweep them away, hide them in the closet, forget the reading altogether.
    Walking always helped to vent her excess energy, so she decided to take a trip across town to look at the house again. It wasn’t very late, the sun just setting. The gray cloth-like clouds were not in formation yet, still filtering in over the bay. It didn’t look like it would rain for a few hours, so she thought she had enough time to make it there and back before the storm broke. She walked along the same tree-lined route Jennifer had driven, careful with her steps, watching for landmarks like the Hawthorne Hotel and the Salem Maritime National Historic Site. She didn’t want to get lost walking home when she was still learning her way. 
    It was dark by the time she saw the old house waiting stoically along the road, more hidden behind oaks and shrubs than other homes in the neighborhood. Though the others were well lit outdoors, this one stayed dark. She wouldn’t have known it was there if she hadn’t already seen it. There were no lights on inside either, and it looked like no one was home, so she walked onto the lawn and pondered the old wooden structure, wondering what scenes it had seen and what stories it could tell. For such an old house it was well maintained. It looked like other historic buildings in the neighborhood dating from the seventeenth century, only this was no museum as the others were. This was someone’s home. 
    She thought about the house she left behind in the Hollywood Hills, modern-looking, cookie-cutter, whitewashed stucco, one that looked light and airy on the outside but trembled inside with permanent distress from an unfortunate marriage. The morning before she left for Massachusetts she stood outside and memorized the place where she had lived for ten years, the way it peeked from a catty-corner on the curving road, the feathery bushes on either side, the waving palm trees behind, the border of blue and purple petunias lining the square front yard. As much as she loved the house itself the memories inside were too hard and it had been time to say good-bye. She moved to Salem with the certainty that she needed a fresh start, but now she was confronted with confusing thoughts about an odd psychic reading and a house she thought she knew.    
    At first glance the seventeenth-century wooden structure seemed dark, heavy, weighted down by an uncertain past. But the longer she studied it the more she decided that it was warmth and nostalgia she felt rather than age and decline. She still didn’t see any movement or hear any sounds coming from inside, so she stepped closer to the front door, inspecting the diamond-paned windows, the wooden slats that made up the exterior walls, the ridge of the shingled roof, the two steep gables pointing upward to the moon in heaven. She walked around to the indented pendill and put her hand on the wood, listening, wondering if she could hear the house explain why it looked familiar to her. Then she stepped closer to the gnarled oak tree, touching the rasping bark, searching for some clue about why she would dream about this house. She watched the ghostly branches stretch toward the sky, each reaching for its own memory from the long history it had seen. 
     When the front door swung open it creaked and startled her. Though it was dark, Sarah saw a man standing skeleton-still in the shadows. He stared at her, his mouth open as if he were trying to speak though he stayed mute. She tried to make herself disappear behind the oak tree, not wishing to disturb anyone, afraid she had been trespassing. She decided she needed to say something to break the awkward silence. 
    “I’m sorry. I just wanted to look at the house.”  
    She began to shiver, not from the nip of the autumn air,