The Moonlight Read Online Free PDF Page A

was invading someone’s privacy—after all, this house and everything in it, including its secrets, now belonged to him.
    There was nothing much.  At the bottom of the chest of drawers he found a leather belt, cracked and brittle with age.  There were about five copies of National Geographic in the night table, all of them dating from the 1930s.  Except for three or four metal clothes hangers, the closet was empty.
    And then he noticed, on the inside of the closet door, a calendar with a drawing of one of those Esquire girls on a windy day, with her skirt blown up high enough to show her garterbelt.  He started to smile at this quaint piece of cheesecake until he noticed the date on the calendar page:  June, 1941.
    Would George Patchmore and all succeeding tenants have found the view past this lady’s nylons so appealing that they would have left her hanging there for nearly fifty years?  It gave him the creeps just to think about it.
    He had thought, at first, that he might move in up here, but in one of those decisions that have more to do with instinct than thought, he decided against it.  He would clean out a room on the second floor instead.  These attic rooms were probably hot as hell at night, and he would prefer to have his meals in the kitchen downstairs.  He would prefer the sense of occupying the whole house rather than just this little garret.  And, besides. . .
    He picked one of the second floor bedrooms at the end of the hall, the one where he could turn left straight out the door and be in the bathroom.  In his apartment in California, the one in which he had spent all four years of his married life and the months after, he had made a sharp left turn into the bathroom, so this new arrangement had the virtue of familiarity.
    In a utility closet downstairs he found a carpet sweeper that looked as if it might have belonged to Dolly Madison—a vacuum cleaner of any vintage would have been too much to hope for—so he took it upstairs with him, along with a broom, a dustpan, and a couple of dust rags from the interior of a pile which was itself covered with dust.  He threw open the bedroom window and, after he had recovered from the blinding sunlight that poured in like a conquering army, started in on the furniture.
    After an hour he was reasonably pleased.  Since, God knows, Peggy had never shown much interest in the Domestic Arts, he had kept the edge on his housekeeping skills.  The place wouldn’t be a hundred percent until he’d had a chance to pick up a few things at the super market—a can of Pledge, for one—but at least he would be able to stand sleeping here.
    The bed still had its boxspring and mattress, covered with a single sheet which he took off and tossed into the bedroom across the hall.  There was a linen closet next to the bathroom, where he found a pile of sheets.  He took two from the middle, so that only their outer edges were yellowed and dusty.  There were also half a dozen blankets, pillow cases and, oddly, only two pillows.  The bed, after he had made it, looked quite appealing.  He sat down on the edge and heard a satisfying squeak from the bedsprings.
    Then, after he had swept the baseboards and the exposed hardwood floor around the edges of the room, he went to work with the carpet sweeper.  He hadn’t been at it for more than thirty seconds when he uncovered the most appalling stain he had ever seen in his life.
    It was a kind of reddish brown and badly faded, and not only by time—someone had once worked very hard to get this out, but without much success.  Phil reached down and touched it, but there was nothing his fingertips could find except carpet.
    With the care of an archeologist, he worked the sweeper around to discover the perimeters of the stain and found that it measured about two feet by ten inches and was roughly kidney-shaped.  He picked up the carpet at its nearest edge and peered underneath.  The stain had gone right through to the other