The Blood Red Indian Summer Read Online Free PDF

other vehicle. He’d been a celebrated New Yorker cartoonist back in his heyday, a dashing and colorful personality with a signature handlebar moustache. Near as Mitch could tell, both Luanne and Lila had harbored schoolgirl crushes on him when Lorelei was alive. These days they functioned as his full-time caregivers. He needed full-time caregivers. At first, folks around Dorset had attributed Winston’s increasingly peculiar behavior to his tippling. He did like his liquor. And Dorset was no stranger to elderly drinkers who liked to kick up their heels after eight or ten martinis. But Winston’s case took an extreme turn. One day, he ran stark naked down Turkey Neck in broad daylight shouting about how badly he wanted to stick his pecker in “some one or some thing .” Actually made it all the way to the mini-mart on Old Shore Road before Des was able to corral him. Then he took to behaving badly in the dining room at the Dorset Country Club. Groping the breasts and bottoms of the waitresses. Groping himself. And then—the final straw—diving under a table and burying his face between the enormous wattled thighs of Amanda Heyer, age eighty-two.
    Quite simply, the poor man seemed to have lost all sexual inhibitions. It wasn’t Alzheimer’s disease, as some around town had speculated. It was frontotemporal dementia. There was no cure and no effective way to slow its progression. All that the doctors could do was try to manage Winston’s behavioral symptoms with medication. All that the sisters could do was try to keep him calm, clean and fed—and watch him get steadily worse. They’d have to put him in a nursing home when they could no longer handle him.
    Mitch climbed out of his Studey, gathered up the two cartons of food he’d brought and let himself in the front door. Like a lot of the old houses in Dorset, the Joshua place had wide-planked oak floors and low ceilings. Unlike a lot of the old houses it reeked of mildewed rugs and cat urine. Nearly a dozen cats dozed here, there, everywhere. The sisters needed them. They had mice here, there, everywhere. Also spiderwebs and dust bunnies like he’d never seen before. If they owned a vacuum they hadn’t used it since the dawn of the twenty-first century. There was an eerie, lost-in-time aura about the Joshua place. Maybe it was all of those antique, hand-wound wall clocks that were tick-tick-ticking away in every room, each one keeping its own sweet time. Or maybe it was all of those empty spaces on the walls. Luanne and Lila had been forced to sell off many of the old family paintings. A lot of their antique furniture was gone, too. He could still see the depressions in the rug where their dining table once stood.
    He called out to them.
    “Good morning, Mitch!” Luanne responded cheerily.
    “We’re in the kitchen, dear!” Lila chimed in.
    They were sipping their morning coffee at the kitchen table, each of them immaculately turned out in a crisp summer dress, freshly made-up, coiffed and perfumed. Luanne and Lila were always very particular about their appearance. They were also unfailingly gracious and upbeat. Both sisters were blue eyed and silver haired, but the resemblance ended there. Lila, the younger of the two, was slender, shy and had a fluttery, clueless manner. Luanne, her big sister, was stockier, calmer and gave the impression of being on top of things. She wasn’t. They were equally helpless. As far as Mitch knew, neither sister had ever held a job. Or lived anywhere else. All they had was each other and this old house, which they refused to sell but couldn’t afford to keep up. To save on heat during the cold months they occupied a mere half-dozen of its twenty-eight rooms. There were entire wings of the place that Mitch felt certain they hadn’t entered in years. He couldn’t imagine what manner of wildlife lived up in the attic.
    There was a glassed-in sun porch off the kitchen that the sisters were letting Callie use as a studio. She