The Orphan of Awkward Falls Read Online Free PDF Page B

Arctic Circle, she figured it was worth a shot. “I want to see if I can find anything on the web.”
    Howard picked cornbread crumbs from his sweater and flicked them into the fire. “Sorry, dear, we’re not connected yet. The satellite guy is supposed to come out next week.”
    Barbara brightened. “We could try the library in town, Josephine. They may have records of the house and its former residents.”
    “Good thinking,” said Howard. “Sometimes nothing beats a good old-fashioned library.”
    “We’ll go first thing tomorrow morning, Jo, as soon as your father is off to work. Maybe we’ll find a nice yoga studio in the village while we’re there. It’ll be fun!”
    Josephine nodded casually, careful not to appear as if she had had forgiven them for their recent transgressions. “Whatever.”
    She stared at the old brown photo, biting her pinkie nail. What had started out as a lousy day had ended much better than she hadexpected it to. If she had to live in the boonies, she guessed, at least she had the puzzle of the photograph to sink her teeth into until school started. It annoyed her to realize she was actually looking forward to tomorrow.

    After dinner, Josephine left her parents discussing wallpaper and climbed the stairs to her new room. She was tired and planned to read herself to sleep. She put on her flannel pajamas (hand-me-downs from Howard) and selected one of the Poe books from the bookshelf. She got comfortable in the window seat and wiped the dust from the cover of
The Raven and Other Poems.
    It was late when Josephine finally closed the book and turned off her light. Outside in the foggy darkness, the moon glowed like a flashlight with dying batteries. She watched the black trees as wisps of fog crept slowly through their upper branches. Then the fog thinned slightly and the moon revealed a building next door, just beyond the line of hemlock trees. The structure seemed far too large to be a house, although she could not imagine what else it might be. It had the blocky shape of old courthouses she had seen, and there was a widow’s walk on the roof.
    A flickering light, the kind created by a candle, appeared in an upper window of the building, outlining the silhouette of a man. Josephine sat up straight, recognizing a good spying opportunity. She noticed right away that there was something odd about the man,a curious awkwardness in the way he moved. The candle gave her a quick glimpse of his face just before the building disappeared again behind a thick fog bank. Maybe it was a trick of the light, or maybe she was imagining things, but the face seemed vaguely…inhuman.

    She waited and watched intently for another look, but the fog did not reveal the building and its strange inhabitant again.

When a mosquito sees a light in the darkness, it is drawn to it by an urge too powerful to resist. Even if the light is a bug zapper, caked with the carcasses of all the mosquito’s electrocuted relatives, the poor insect will still use the last flap of its wings to fly to its death. It simply can’t help it.
    Part of Josephine’s brain, though much larger and more complex than a mosquito’s, functioned similarly. If she became curious about something, this part of her brain jumped into the driver’s seat and took control. When Josephine saw the strange person in the window, the reckless-driver part of her brain grabbed the wheel. She was absolutely tingling with curiosity and badly needed to know what she had seen in the fog, to know whether it was real or not.
    She pulled on Eggplant and put her sweater on over her pajamas, mumbling to herself the whole time that this was a crazy idea and she really should have her head examined, but she didn’t pause for a second. She eased downstairs as quietly as possible on thesqueaky old staircase. At the door to her parents’ room she paused and considered telling them about the house and the man she had seen, but decided against it when she heard their