Old Wounds Read Online Free PDF Page B

sagging porches festooned with ancient rambling roses, had been demolished in favor of the massive, four-storied brick Tudor-style house that rose in less than a year. The fact that no local builders were employed had rankled the native inhabitants of Ridley Branch and they had watched, incredulous, as truck after truck of building supplies were followed by a small fleet of campers, bearing the crew of workers. Soon the dwelling under construction was spoken of as “a mansion house” and speculation ran wild as to what the “millionaire new folks” would do next.
    All the construction and landscaping had been finished when we moved here, but people were
still
talking about it. I think some of them were a little disappointed when we built such an ordinary, modest house.
Elizabeth’s neighbor Dessie, gone now, but always vividly alive in memory, had declared, “Why you uns ain’t a bit like them Mullinses! You and yore man is just as
common!”
It was a compliment, Elizabeth had come to realize.
    She continued her descent, out of the forest into the rolling meadow that had circled the many-gabled house like a smooth jade collar. Smooth no longer. She picked her way through a maze of rampant growth: locust saplings in thorny and painful profusion; tall pokeweed that leaned over her, its strong magenta stems culminating in dangling clusters of hard emerald berries; and then a regiment of pale gray-green thistles, standing like prickly sentinels, their purple blooms mostly gone to down. A bevy of goldfinches, disturbed at their feeding, rose up from the thistles in a twittering cloud and scattered in their curious swooping, faltering flight.
    I can understand why the Mullins would have wanted to leave after such a tragedy. But why didn’t they try to sell the place?
The great house loomed in the center of the cove bottom: a towering mass of deep purple-red brick relieved by multiple half-timbered gables. The lower windows were masked with plywood, but the upper ones were bare, their multiple panes winking blindly in the sun. It was an impressive piece of architecture and could have taken its place in a prosperous gated community without exciting comment.
Tudor revival—“stockbroker Tudor,” I think the Brits call it. But here—I don’t know—it’s like a spaceship in a cornfield.
    It probably
had
been a cornfield, she mused, standing at the outer edge of the formal landscaping that had transformed this particular bit of Appalachia into the semblance of an English estate. Before her, the empty swimming pool gaped, its azure-tiled basin stained by the detritus of many seasons. She walked to the edge and saw that among the drifts of leaves and rotting black walnut hulls were the scattered and bleached bones of some large animal—a deer?
It must have blundered in and couldn’t get out.
She turned away, with a sick pang, saddened as always, at the suffering of animals in a man-made world.
The suffering of the innocent.
    Broad limestone paving, now almost invisible beneath the fallen leaves, ringed the pool. Stately urns that she had last seen filled with late-blooming azaleas, their pink and coral blooms massed in tight perfection, now overflowed with a jumble of dead or dying weeds and a few tiny persistent seedling maples.
    She remembered the scene as it had been twenty years ago: the pool shimmering turquoise, the assorted parents, drinks in hand, milling about, while at the far end of the pavement, in the open pavilion, a top-hatted magician entertained his audience of children. The pavilion was shuttered now, the children grown.
Except for Maythorn.
Elizabeth stood bemused, unwelcome memories flooding back, threatening to overcome her.
    Well, here you are at last! Patricia Mullins had separated herself from a chattering crowd and hurried on clicking high heels toward Sam and Elizabeth. Tight blue jeans outlined her shapely legs and her blue chambray “work shirt,” heavily embellished with rhinestone studs, was