Hold The Dark: A Markhat story Read Online Free PDF Page B

who packed their clothes would certainly take their reading glasses and a book or two as well.
    The closet was full. I mean packed tight—clothes upon clothes upon clothes. I pulled a handful of dresses out at random and spread them on the bed.
    Darla had been right. Martha had a gift. She’d taken silk and cotton and wool and made works of art.
    I poked around in the closet, counted ten pairs of shoes, fifty-six dresses, nineteen pairs of pants and a plethora of hats and scarves and undergarments I left untouched lest the Hoobins hang me from a ceiling beam or mount my head above the mantel. Also in the corner was a good leather clothes bag. It was new and empty and if it had ever been used I couldn’t spot it.
    I finished poking in the corners and turned from the closet to the dresser. I spent a few moments rifling through the drawers, starting at the bottom and working toward the top like a good burglar. Stockings and unmentionables and bolts of silk and linen were all I found.
    Atop the dresser lay neat ranks of moderately expensive make-up, the various and sundry tools of application, and a plain glass jar full to the brim with clothes-pins, bent needles and bits of this and that.
    Satisfied that the dresser contained no threatening letters from deranged suitors or the torn halves of still-legible stagecoach tickets, I opened the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. There were more clothes, more bolts of new fabric, a stack of old books and a tiny cedar jewelry box in which a single gold ring lay. Atop it all was a ragged stuffed bear, more tatters than fur, wrapped in a clean white towel with a tiny pillow tucked under its head.
    I closed the chest and entered the bathroom. Aside from a fancy flushing toilet and hot running water in the sink, I found nothing there worth mentioning except the half-used bottle of bath suds that smelled of Darla’s hair.
    I closed the bathroom door behind me, heard footfalls on the stair, counted, divided and decided that all the Hoobins were about to pop in and see what I was up to.
    I sighed, regarded my glum expression in Martha’s big round dressing mirror, and saw a tiny glimmer of silver from deep within the junk jar at the edge of her dresser.
    I went that way. I’d marveled at the way Martha’s make-up, combs and whatnots were lined up in neat ranks on the dresser-top. You see that a lot, with poor folks who come into money—they tend to treat every possession, no matter how humble, like a treasure. Martha was certainly that way. The junk jar was only there for things she didn’t want to throw away yet, but had no particular affection for.
    So what was that gleaming silver at the bottom?
    I was dumping it out just as Ethel popped his head in the door.
    “Have you found aught amiss?” he said.
    I froze. There it is, said a voice only I could hear. Finally.
    “Oh, I have indeed.” I picked my “aught amiss” up, shook a pair of sewing needles out of the bristles. “Have you ever seen this before? Any of you?”
    I held it up, and they crowded around, tip-toeing on Martha’s fine red rugs just as I had.
    I’d found a comb. A silver-handled comb, worked in the shape of a swan, finely cast, laden with detail, heavy in my hand like the small fortune it surely cost.
    The brothers Hoobin shook their honest heads.
    “No, never.”
    “Not I.”
    “Nor I.”
    “No,” said Ethel. He scowled at the comb as if he could make it confess to a litany of sins merely by glaring it toward righteousness. “No, I have not seen this thing.”
    I nodded toward the dresser. “But you have seen that one. The comb there.”
    I pointed. They all nodded yes. “It was our mother’s, and her mother’s before,” said Ethel. “From where did this comb come?”
    I squinted. There were no hairs in the bristles.
    You use a comb once—even once—and there will be hairs.
    I felt like dancing. Instead, I shrugged. “I found it there. Stuffed in that jar, with a lot of other junk.”
    “But