Julia Read Online Free PDF

wobbling in the direction of the next sandbox, and went to where she thought the blond girl had been sitting. Julia knelt down above the spot. For a second she hesitated, wondering if she were trespassing on a secret or a code, and then she drew her hand along the sand as the girl had done. Her hand met no resistance. She repeated the action. Then she delicately scooped a little of the sand out of the hollow she had made. Very slowly, she continued to drag her fingertips through the little hollow.When the depression was three or four inches deep, her fingers touched something hard and metallic, and she dug cautiously around it, still using only one hand. Gradually she uncovered a small knife. Gummy sand was sticking to its blade. Julia looked at the knife in puzzlement and then scraped more sand from the hollow. Her fingers caught an edge of something hard, and almost without any pressure, she levered up from the sand the corpse of a small turtle of the size that had been sold to children for a quarter in Julia’s own childhood. It took her a moment to see that it had been mutilated.
    Vomit rushed up from the floor of Julia’s stomach, and dropping the mutilated turtle and the small knife back into the hollow, she swallowed the bitter stuff back down again. With her foot she scattered sand over the turtle and the knife. Julia left the sand trap quickly, fearing she might faint, and moved toward a shaded bench on the main path through the center of the park. I’ll just sit here and catch my breath, she thought, before I see Lily. She unthinkingly rubbed her hands on her dress, and after a few minutes noticed that she had left a small smear of blood along one seam. Sweat had broken out over her face; Julia blotted it on her sleeve, which instantly showed a series of dark crescents and ragged blotches. She made her mind empty: she concentrated on the sun, on the prickling she felt along her forearms and on her forehead. She was unable to look at the children.
    After some minutes had passed, Julia raised her head and closed her eyes against the strong sunlight. She needed sunglasses. Somewhere, she had sunglasses. They were back at Gayton Road. She could visualize them, their bows crossed, lying on a formica counter in the kitchen. She’d buy another pair. Yes, she thought, I jumped into reacting, I did not think.There was no proof the girl had killed the turtle or cut it up that way. Julia may even have been probing the wrong spot in the sand. Little girls so pretty did not do things like that: it was an unfair psychological rule that handsome children were healthier and more stable than ugly ones. In fact—Julia allowed the idea to seep cautiously into articulation—she had been upset because the sight of the turtle reminded her of what had happened to Kate.
    She could speak of none of this to Lily. Making that resolution, Julia stood up from the bench and cut across the long stretch of grass, going toward Plane Tree House. She really did feel peculiar.

TWO
    The two women sat on Lily’s terrace in the sun, now milder than it had been an hour before. “Poor Lily’s” hair, prematurely gray like Magnus’s, had been cropped since Julia had last seen her sister-in-law, and it lay flat and short as a boy’s, emphasizing the fragile lines of her face and making her look more than ever at an oblique relationship to the rest of the world. Yet Lily had remained unruffled by Julia’s news and Julia’s high-pitched, taut mood. For half an hour, Julia had considered that Lily might be pleased that she would have Magnus to herself again, but she knew that this was grossly uncharitable: Lily simply did not respond as other people did. In the end, her news given, Julia had allowed herself to relax, cosseted by Lily’s hospitality—she was now drinking her third gin and bitter lemon, served in a tall glass chiming with ice—and Lily’s unpredictability.
    “You
are
extraordinary, though,” Lily was saying. “Extraordinary