Precious and Fragile Things Read Online Free PDF Page B

pole, but fortunately her hands didn’t stick. She grunted as she shoved once more. More pain in her back, her hands, her freezing face, her cramped toes. The gate groaned open the rest of the way, and the truck pulled through.
    It didn’t stop right away and for one panicked moment Gilly thought he was going to leave her behind. Then the red glare of the taillights came on, bathing everything in a horror-show haze. Once open, the gate wouldn’t close. Gilly pulled thesleeves of her jacket down over her palms to get a better grip and protect her hands, but that only made them slip worse. She tugged, hard, and fell on her ass.
    The truck revved. Gilly got to her feet, slipping and sliding. He hadn’t stabbed her. He wasn’t going to drive away and leave her here to freeze, either. She ran anyway as best she could on frozen toes. Her fingers slipped again on the door handle. Gilly climbed back into the truck and slammed the door.
    He drove for another thirty minutes along a road so twisted and potholed Gilly had to grip the door handle just to keep herself upright every time the truck bounced. Trees pressed in on them. Some branches even snaked out to scrape along the truck’s side. At one point, the battered driveway took a steep pitch upward. The tires spun on loose gravel. They were climbing.
    At last, the man stopped the truck in front of a battered two-story house, bathing it in the twin beams of the bright headlights. House was too flattering a term. It was more like a shack. A sagging front porch with three rickety steps lined the front. Green rocking chairs, the sort with legs made from a single piece of bended metal, lined the porch. Gilly had seen chairs like that in 1950s pictures of her grandparents vacationing in the Catskills.
    He turned off the ignition. Darkness clapped its hand over her eyes. Gilly blinked, momentarily blind.
    â€œGet out,” the man said without preamble.
    He opened the door and stepped into the glacial night air, then shoved the keys into the pocket of his ratty sweatshirt, slammed the door shut and headed toward the house without hesitation. He quickly blended into the dark.
    Without the light of the headlamps to guide her, the distance from the truck to the front porch became instantlyunnavigable. She already knew the ground here was frozen and hard. At best she’d fall on her ass again. At worst, she’d end up with a broken leg.
    Gilly put her hand on the door. Tremors tickled her, and her fingers twitched on the handle. Her feet jittered on the duffel bag. Only her eyes felt wide and staring, motionless while the rest of her body went into some strange sort of Saint Vitus’ dance.
    She was dreaming. Was she dreaming? Was this real? In the dark, the silent dark, Gilly had to press her twitching fingers to her eyelids to convince herself they were open. Like a blind woman she felt the contours of her face, trying to convince herself that it was her own and uncertain, in the end, if it was.
    The slanting shack began to glow from the four windows along its front. The light was strange, yellow and dim, but it gave her the courage to open the door. The meager glow was just enough to allow Gilly to make her stumbling way to the front porch steps, and then through the door he’d left open.
    She entered a small, square room with a sooty woodstove on a raised brick platform between the two windows along the back wall. Now she could see why the light coming from the windows seemed so odd. Propane, not electric, lights illuminated the room. She wrinkled her nose against the smell, which reminded her of summer camp.
    Despite the stains and dirt on the carpet she could see it was indisputably green. Not emerald, not hunter, but mossy and dull. The color of mold. The furniture grouped around the woodstove was faded brown plaid with rough-hewn wooden arms and feet. The two long sofas facing each other across a battered coffee table looked in decent enough