The Dark Door Read Online Free PDF Page A

past the main entrance. The rain was falling, more like a mist now, settling gently with great persistence, as if a mammoth cloud were being lowered to earth. He got back to his motel, back to his room, and fell into bed—and sleep—without undressing.
    It was one of the very few nights of the past nine months that he was untroubled by dreams, that he awakened feeling refreshed and vital.

Chapter 3
    October 1985. Constance Leidl drove home happily that October afternoon. The two year old Volvo still smelled of apples; a stack of books from the university library added its own peculiar, comforting odor, but the dominant fragrance was of fall, of wood stoves, frosts to come, and burning leaves. “The world is draped in the glory of autumn,” one of the patients in the hospital had murmured to her. A hopeless schizophrenic, wandering in a world of poetry and surrealism. Constance shook her head, then smiled, remembering Charlie’s complaint as they had picked apples over the past three days. “Honey, I don’t get it. Why do we tend all these damn trees and then just give away the apples?”
    “Do you want strangers in here picking them?”
    “Come on!”
    “Well then“
    “It’s not one or the other,” he had said indignantly.
    “We could sell off the hillside.”
    He garumphed at her grin. “Okay. But tell me why we are doing this.” A cold breeze had colored his cheeks as red as the apples they were picking. He had stopped working and was regarding her with a mutinous expression.
    “Well,” she had said with what she considered great practicality, “because.”
    “Ah,” he had said, illuminated, and they had returned to the chore of picking apples.
    Today she had delivered three bushels of them to the hospital. There were twenty bushels on the back porch, some to be called for, some to be delivered. She hummed under her breath. Just because. She loved this section of the drive home from the hospital she had visited. On one side of the blacktop county road stretched a pasture graced by three sorrel horses that struck poses whenever traffic was present. A white fence completed that picture. On the other side, the side she lived on, a two-hundred year old farmhouse marked what she thought of here as her stretch. The old house was of stone and wood and bricks, with a slate roof; the Dorsetts lived there. They said Dorsetts had always lived there, would always live there. She believed that. Next was a tall, cedar sided house with a southern face constructed mostly of glass. The Mitchums lived there. They had four sons, all husky football types. Two of the boys had come over to complete the apple picking, and had taken away two bushels of apples for their labors. Sometimes Constance fried the special Swedish cookies that Charlie loved more than any other sweet, and gave most of them to the Mitchum boys. She had explained that, also. If she kept them in the house, Charlie ate them, and at his age—fifty plus—he did not need all those calories. The boys did. When he asked if she couldn’t simply make fewer, she had said no.
    Everywhere maple trees blazed and cast red light on the world. Autumn had been benign so far. Its progress had been gentle, with a few early hard frosts, then a mellow Indian summer, and now more frosts. There had not been a tree stripping windstorm, or slashing rain. A long expanse of pasture—the Mitchums kept goats—and finally her own house appeared. The lowering sun turned the maples in her front yard into welcoming torches. It fired the chrysanthemums that edged the driveway with a carpet runner of red, rust, glowing yellow, and white. There was a silver Mercedes parked in the center of the driveway in front of the garage door.
    Constance scowled at the other car. The drive was wide enough for two cars, but not if one that size took the center. And, she thought with irritation, she’d be damned if she would run over the chrysanthemums. She stopped behind the Mercedes and got out.