Some Kind of Fairy Tale Read Online Free PDF

him. He told me they had a falling-out before we met. They haven’t spoken in all these years.”
    Tara put her hands to her face. “That would be my fault that they fell out. They were great friends. Before—”
    “What happened, Tara? Why don’t you just say in simple words what happened?”
    The door opened. It was Mary. “Are you girls baking that cake, or what?”

CHAPTER FOUR
Are you a witch
    Are you a fairy?
    Are you the wife
    Of Michael Cleary?
    CHILDREN’S RHYME
    FROM SOUTHERN TIPPERARY, IRELAND
    New Year’s Day. Tara promised to tell Peter everything on New Year’s Day. Why? Peter had asked. Why couldn’t she tell him there and then? She said because after she’d told him, he wouldn’t want to speak to her again, and that she’d wanted to get through Christmas for the sake of Dell and Mary. But, she promised, she would tell him all of it. Everything.
    She asked if they could go for a walk together on New Year’s Day through the Outwoods. He could bring Gen and the kids and the dogs. She pointed out that it used to be a great tradition in the Martin household. Dell, Mary, Peter, and Tara would always walk in the Outwoods, a couple of times with Richie, too, and always with Peter’s terrier Nix.
    “Where is Nix, by the way?” Tara had asked Peter.
    “Hell, Tara, Nix died about fifteen years ago. Dad buried her in the garden in the rose bed.”
    “Oh, of course.” Then Tara had cried bitterly.
    “We had lovely roses come where we buried him.”
    “Don’t.”
    The walks through the Outwoods had stopped after Tara had disappeared. It didn’t seem right. There were more walks, but they went instead to Bradgate Park, where the spirit of Lady Jane Grey sighed in the ruins of her Elizabethan mansion, or up on Beacon Hill, with its Iron Age earthworks and its weird crags. The Outwoods forever carried the stamp of Tara’s ghost. Peter had been sure for twenty years that she had haunted the place, and for some reason the sudden unpicking of that belief terrified him more than had Tara’s ghost. Now that she was alive he quickly had to review his ideas about hauntings. Perhaps living souls had greater phantom powers than the dead.
    “She wants us all to go for a walk with her,” he told Genevieve. “All of us.”
    “What, she thinks we can drag this lot out walking? Doesn’t know much about teenagers, does she?”
    “Says she’s going to tell me everything.”
    “You should go alone.”
    “You want to come?”
    “I’d like to. I’d like to hear what it is she has to say. But I’ve got a feeling it ought to be just you and her.”
    “I think I need you to be there. To stop me from punching her.”
    Genevieve blinked at that. Peter, a strong and powerfully built man, had never talked that way and had never raised his fists to anyone in all the time she’d known him. “We could leave Zoe in charge. I’ll come if you want me to. Think it over.”
    Think it over. The problem was that was all he could do: think about it. Last thing at night and first thing in the morning. He considered that maybe he should go back to work early, take his mind off Tara.
    Peter was a farrier. He had his own business, mostly shoeing horses but occasionally turning his hand to other bits of ironwork. He hadn’t always been a farrier. After completing a degree in social psychology he had looked around for a job related to his studies. A recession-hit Britain didn’t seem to have too many vacancies, so he took a sales job in confectionary, thrashing up and down the motorway, selling bars of chocolate.
    He was an affable man and found strangers easy to talk to. He got the orders and didn’t find the job too stressful. But it was a kind of sleep to him. You descended into work mode and hardly noticed that a day of your life had passed. After a few years he became a regional manager; he was efficient, well liked, and he reached his quotas. Then the company he worked for was bought out by a larger corporation and he