The Spirit Wood Read Online Free PDF

throw pillows, scattered around the room, that his mother had worked in beautiful and delicate needlepoint. The windows commanded a view of other windows in the building right next door.
    Mrs. Constantine went straight into the kitchen, a narrow galley just off the living room, to look after the pot roast she'd prepared; Peter and Meg flopped down on the sofa, which immediately rose up and threatenedto envelop them. They heard the oven door close; Mrs. Constantine came back into the room, smoothing her hair back along the sides.
    “I think it'll be ready in about another half-hour,” she said, removing an open copy of Ellery Queen magazine from one of the armchairs and sitting down. “So tell me about what's going on at the college. And how you're both feeling. When does the term actually end?”
    Peter and Meg exchanged a quick look, of both surprise and amusement, at his mother's determination even now to avoid the obvious topic of conversation.
    “Well, Mom, aside from the fact that I may have become a millionaire about ten minutes ago, things are just so-so. Mom,” he said, with an exasperated smile, “do you think we could talk about it? About the fact that I never even knew your father was living out there? Or that he was rich? Or that he knew I was alive? Do you think we could clear up some of this age-old mystery now?”
    His mother fidgeted in the chair, then automatically reached down into the sewing basket and pulled out a piece of half-completed needlepoint. A peacock, as far as Peter could make out.
    “It's not really such a great mystery,” she said, meticulously arranging the fabric on her lap. “I'm sorry if I've made it seem so.” Peter knew she was stalling again, just as she had been for twenty-odd years. “He would not have been a good influence, especially for someone as vulnerable as you, a boy who had never even known his own father. He was . . . not ethical, in his personal or business affairs. I think even the circumstances of his death—with the police involved and all—point to that,” she said, as if bolstering her hand.
    “And yet you reverted to your maiden name, his name, when my father died?”

    “Your father died less than a year, one year, after the marriage. Of a rare heart disease—as I've told you.” Her eyes never lifted from the needlepoint; Peter could never remember her meeting his gaze when discussing that marriage. She had mentioned it very infrequently in all those years, and only then in direct reply to a pointed inquiry. Even now, she seemed to be concentrating on imparting as little actual information as possible, on keeping her story— and that was the one word that always crept into Peter's mind when listening to these accounts of his background—as simple, uncluttered, and incontestable as possible. “All my life I'd been Ellen Constantine; it seemed easier, and more sensible, to just go back to it.”
    Meg, feeling things might proceed more smoothly in her absence, indicated, with a look and a silent tilt of her head, that she'd be in the next room napping until further notice. Mrs. Constantine glanced up as she left, then quickly looked down at her needlepoint again.
    “But what was the fight about? Things were okay, weren't they, between you and your father before you got married? What was it about the marriage, or my father, or my birth—if that was it—that caused this incredible rift to open up? And stay open, all these years?”
    His mother's fingers stopped working on the design. As she sat, head lowered, hands still, Peter wondered again how someone so young as she—somewhere in her late forties, he knew, though she'd always been evasive about actual dates—could seem so much older. He had never known her, even when he was a boy, to dress, or act, or carry herself in the way most women her age would have done; she had always seemed older, more faded, more resigned somehow.
    “Your father . . . and mine . . .”—she was speaking so softly