The Aviary Read Online Free PDF

coughed lightly, then hoarsely. When she began to speak again, the coughing came back worse than ever.
    “Mrs. Glendoveer, you mustn’t try to talk now,” Clara said.
    Catching her breath, the sick woman shook her head. “It’s now or never,” she said.
    “I don’t know what you mean.”
    Mrs. Glendoveer’s blue eyes focused on her with riveting directness. “You don’t know what’s ahead. But I can warn you now: at your age, it is not uncommon to be seized with a frightful restlessness. If you haven’t felt it yet, you will soon, I promise.”
    Clara was speechless. How could she know?
    “So many things become a source of dissatisfaction. Your heart can pull you in different directions, and you must decide the right way to go.”
    “What did you do,” Clara asked, “when you were my age?”
    Mrs. Glendoveer took a deep breath. “I started planning my escape. Oh, I didn’t run off until I was seventeen, but I believe it all started around age twelve. I went to every carnival, every traveling show. And when the caravans left, I cried as if I’d been abandoned. Twice, I saw the young magician George Glendoveer, and on the third time, I convinced him to let me assist him onstage. I was very pretty,” she said. “Like you.”
    Clara blushed. This was the second time in two days she had been called pretty. “If you are warning me against joining the carnival, you needn’t worry,” Clara said. “I don’t have the strength to keep up, even if I wanted to.”
    “No, I’m telling you something else: a mother needs to have her loved ones close. I broke my mother’s heart, and in turn mine was broken. Don’t do it to Harriet.”
    Clara shook her head. “I would never, ever.”
    “This is advice for your mother as well as you. No happiness built on another’s pain can come to a good end. I wish someone had told me this when I was young.”
    “I understand,” Clara said.
    Mrs. Glendoveer clapped her hands together softly. “Good. That’s done.”
    Clara then took the hairbrush and ran it back from Mrs. Glendoveer’s brow. The old woman closed her eyes. “Aah,” she said, “I’m so very tired.”
    When Clara finished smoothing Mrs. Glendoveer’s hair into a topknot, she found that the tea had turned cold. “I’ll get you a fresh cup,” she said.
    Clara stood outside the bedroom door for a moment with her hand over the apron pocket holding the letter to Daphne. She had to wonder how Mrs. Glendoveer had chosen that moment to warn her about inner restlessness and bad behavior.
    She walked down the hall deep in thought, until a sight in the turret window startled her. There on the other side of the glass was her mother, standing on a ladder, wielding the claw end of a hammer. Clara could make out the squeak of a rusty nail being pulled from the clapboard. She approached the window seat and knocked gently on the glass.
    “What are you doing, Mama?”
    “I’m rehanging the shutters,” she called. “But I’m going to need some larger nails.” She held up a bent penny nail. “These are worthless!”
    As Clara watched her mother descend the ladder, theclock tower struck seven. Soon the shutters would be hammered back into place. She closed her eyes and imagined Daphne Aspinal staring up at those closed shutters. In time, Clara supposed, the girl would become absorbed in her new life in Lockhaven, find real friends, and stop looking up at the old Glendoveer house altogether.
    And then what?
    Clara threw the window open. With all her might, she heaved the letter-wrapped rock, hoping to arc it over the yard and box hedge, down onto the sidewalk where Daphne would soon be walking. But she could feel the weakness in her arm as the stone left her grasp and watched it fly high in the air and drop smack into the bushes.
    The air left her lungs. Who would ever find that note now? She closed the window and walked slowly down to the kitchen, dabbing her eyes as the terrible hammering began.
    Clara fixed