Spring Rain Read Online Free PDF Page B

toward home. Just a look, he told himself. Just a look.
    Seaside was the same in so many ways. It was amazing. He knew that on the beach the old homes were being torn down, and great new homes with masses of windows and endless decks were being constructed, just waiting for a hurricane to come along and destroy them. Here in the center of town, the old summer cottages and Victorian rooming houses still stood, shingles bleached by sun and salt air. Most of them were closed up, their doors and windows shuttered for another month or two until the seasonal preparations began.
    He turned a corner, and Leigh’s old home came into view. Memory smote him like it was yesterday. He closed his eyes against the sharp stab of regret.
    If I weren’t a Christian
, he thought for the thousandth time,
I’d never even remember her. She’d just be one of many.
    Instead she was his one and only.
    He sighed.
Oh, Lord, I know I’m going to see her almost daily. She can’t run away like she usually does because she has to stay here and go to school. You’re going to have to get me through the next stretch of time.It will be difficult for both of us, assuming she even remembers. And of course, there’s the matter of Ted.
    He forced himself to unclench his teeth. He climbed out of the car, Terror on his heels.
    “Don’t you go near the street, boy,” he instructed the dog. “Stay with me.”
    Terror looked at him with his happy grin and leaned against his leg. It was like he said, “Whither thou goest.…”
    Weeds, still winter brown, resided in the cracks of the concrete walk and in what had once been a small garden. There a few shoots of hardy daffodils moved lazily in the ever present breeze, the buds fat with nascent bloom. The lawn, never worth that name at the best of times, was a stretch of sandy dirt reaching from curb to house. An occasional clump of Bermuda grass struggled to survive in the arid soil. The only bright spot was a huge, unruly forsythia in full bloom at the southeast corner of the house.
    The clapboard was so bleached that it was impossible to tell its original color, and the paint on the window frames was peeling like an old sunburn. The door was a dingy, streaked, and incredibly ugly blue. The roof was missing shingles, and the gutters and a downspout had broken loose from their moorings, leaning drunkenly across a broken aluminum chaise.
    Did they fall because of a storm or just neglect? Who knew? Who cared? Certainly not neighbors, for there were none.
    The Spenser property had always stood off by itself, more than a block in any direction from another house, and amazingly that hadn’t changed. Pampas grass as tall as a man stretched from Leigh’s house to the next house in each direction. A redwing blackbird sat on a stalk of the grass and trilled, its wing slash of crimson and yellow brilliant against its black plumage. The lots across the street were less wild in appearance though just as vacant, nothing but scrub growth able to survive in the sandy soil.
    Clay always figured the Spensers lived so away from people because Johnny wanted privacy for his nefarious dealings. Unfortunately in a small town like Seaside, that seclusion isolated Leigh further from a normal life.
    Behind the house was the bird reserve that adjoined the property. Back there, just the other side of the now trackless bed of the railroad that had once linked the shore communities of SouthJersey, lay the marshes with more wheat-colored pampas grass waving in the breeze. In the brackish streams that laced the marshes lived waterfowl of all kinds: blue herons with their long, snaky necks, topknotted kingfishers, straw-billed egrets, iridescent mallards, midnight black grebes with their white beaks, and a multitude of geese.
    Beyond the marshes was the bay, wide and beautiful, home, at least here where development hadn’t encroached, to the splendid osprey and countless less flamboyant birds. His mother had written him about the local