The Keeper Read Online Free PDF

trail of blood in her wake. She’d held her hands protectively over her bloated stomach, and Georgia had understood that the girl was pregnant. Understood that something terrible was about to be born. She woke up with a start at six this morning, just as the sky had opened up to rain.
    Now, the rain really started falling. Little streams of water slid down Matthew’s face and dripped off his nose. “It’s only rain, we could have stayed,” he said, kicking at newly formed puddles in the center of the street.
    “It might make me melt,” she said. She joined him in the street and grabbed his hand to hurry him along, but he pushed her away.
    “Oh, I forgot, you don’t hold hands anymore.”
    “Mo-om,” he mumbled, his jaw sticking out.
    “Okay, no hands. Look, no hands!” She pretended that they had disappeared underneath the sleeves of her jacket.
    He rolled his eyes, but she knew that he was amused. She walked ahead in hopes of getting him to move faster, and then felt a splash of water across the backs of her legs. She turned to find Matthew wearing his trouble grin.
    “Oh yeah?” she asked, splashing back but with longer legs so that he was soaked in cold, muddy water, head to toe. “Oops!” she said.
    “Mom!” he cried, lunging at her. His hands were open rather than closed and he pushed lightly just above her waist. She was tempted to hold him there, and he lingered before letting go.
    “You didn’t think I’d do it, did you? You thought I was just your old mother, huh?” she asked softly.
    He ran ahead to another puddle and waited for her to walk by. “I’m gonna get you so-o bad!” he shouted. But despite all earnest attempts, for the rest of the walk home she successfully dodged his splashes.

     
    W hen they arrived at the small, neatly kept wooden house, she rang the bell and waited for her father to answer the door.
    Matthew stood close behind her and shivered. “Don’t you have keys?” he asked.
    “No, I forgot them,” she said.
    “I always remember my keys when I come home from school and nobody’s home.”
    “I know you do, you’re very good about that.”
    “How come you don’t remember your keys?”
    “Because you’re a freak accident of the gene pool, Matthew.”
    “What?”
    “Nothing.”
    He sighed and began to play on the front steps. There were eight of them, all brick, leading to the porch. She banged on the door.
    “He’s not home, Mom.”
    “He might be.” She banged again. Her knuckles started to hurt.
    Matthew waited a few seconds, then reiterated. “He’s not home. He left for those talks he has on Thursdays.”
    She remembered now. Her father had been kept on Clott’s payroll to help the town through its transition. On Thursdays he went to his office at the mill and directed conference calls with management in Boston. “Yeah. I guess you’re right,” she said. “We’ll have to go through a window. I think there’s a good one around back.”
    “I can do it, I’m smaller.”
    “That’s all right, Matt. You wait under the door and try to keep dry.”
    “But if the window isn’t open, I can climb the trellis up to my bedroom. I’ve done it before. I’m really good at climbing.”
    “Don’t tell me these things, Matt. You’re not allowed to do that,” she said with a look of anger that she did not really feel. He was always doing crazy things; scaling the house, climbing trees, bouncing around like he was made of India rubber.
    “Okay,” he told her in a way that said she was missing the point.
    “And stop jumping down those steps, you’re gonna slip and brain yourself,” she hollered.
    “Uh huh,” he mumbled as she turned the corner of the house.
    Around back, the first window she tried was open. She wormed her body through the opening, falling gracelessly to the floor of the living room. It reminded her of one of those old Abbott and Costello movies, the fat-guy-squeezing-through-the-small-space gag. “Very dainty,” she muttered