Lizzie Borden Read Online Free PDF Page B

think about what he’s about to do. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”
    “Maybe.”
    They both heard the front door open and close. Emma sat on the edge of Lizzie’s bed, looking at her hands in her lap, while Abby Borden’s heavy footsteps stopped at the coat closet, continued through the dining room to the kitchen, stopped at the stove, then clomped up the back stairs to her bedroom. They both heard the door to their parents’ bedroom open. Lizzie had pushed her dressing table up against the connecting door, but sounds were clearly heard.
    “I can’t stand to listen to the existence of that woman,” Emma said, and walked through to her own room, leaving Lizzie to sit with her cold cabbage stew and sour stomach.
    She set the food on the floor by her door, unlaced her shoes and took them off. Then she lay on her bed and brought a quilt up over her. She knew her dress would wrinkle and that someone was sure to comment on it, but for the moment, she didn’t care, she didn’t care, she didn’t care. She settled herself comfortably, unclenched her fists and tried to think of happy thoughts. She tried to think of some happy memories, but they somehow eluded her. She tried to remember her mother’s face, but all she knew was one photograph of a young woman, a young Emma, really, and a description of her personality from her father. She tried to remember games she and Emma used to play when they were little, but it seemed as though there never were games in this house, it seemed there never were children in this house.
    So Lizzie went to the only place she knew that never let her down. She went to a place filled with warmth and beauty and solace.  In the midst of turmoil around her, Lizzie closed her mind, closed her eyes and went fishing.
     

Emma finished wiping down the kitchen counters and hung the soiled dishrag over the sink in the little utility room off the kitchen. Her stomach still burned from the confrontation with her father. Her unreasonable father. Her elderly, unreasonable father. Then she unlocked the kitchen door and threw the basin of dishwater into the snow. The dining room clock chimed the half hour; Emma assumed it was eight-thirty. Her father and his wife had gone to bed an hour before, as had Bridget, the maid. Lizzie had never come down after dinner.
    She fit a fresh candle into a candlestick, lit it and blew out the lanterns in the kitchen.
    Why was it, she wondered, that she so cherished time alone in this house during the day, yet at night she longed for company? She walked through the empty dining room, places carefully set for breakfast by Bridget before she retired for the night. The candle she carried threw exaggerated shadows on the walls as she walked. They weren’t satisfactory company at all.
    She checked the front door to make sure it was tightly locked. For over two years—ever since the threats against Andrew Borden by his ill-treated employees began—security at the Borden house had been tight. Extra tight. Obnoxious. Every room in the house had its own key, and every personal room was always locked, whether it was occupied or not. The front door had three locks, the back door two, each the bedrooms one.
    What was there to steal, anyway? Abby Borden kept a few dollars and a few pieces of jewelry on hand, but there was nothing of value, there was nothing even of sentimental value, in this house.
    Except, perhaps, the suspicion. The locking and unlocking of doors had created an air of suspicion about the house. Whenever Emma left her bedroom, and locked it with a key, she always tried the knob one more time, to make sure it was locked. To make sure no one could get in. No one. And even though she knew that there was nothing kept in any of the other rooms—to which she could have access had she wanted—just knowing that the other rooms were locked made her wonder what they were hiding. Emma had her secrets—oh yes, she had her secrets all right, but they were not in her room and