The Whispering House Read Online Free PDF Page B

stay. Whatever it was, we’re never going to find out now.” She put the doll down and looked at her watch. “It’s getting late. Do you want to come and help me make dinner?”
    â€œOkay.”
    Her mother left the room, but Hannah remained looking thoughtfully at the doll. There was something slightly shocking about those pathetic bruised limbs. Because that was just how the marks looked. Like neat, evenly spaced bruises. Gently she ran her finger over one of the marks and noticed that in the center was a tiny hole, the size of a pin. She ran her finger over another and noticed the same thing.
    Then she examined the doll carefully. In the center of each stain was a pinhole. Every one. She stared in bewilderment. What kind of game would make a little girl want to stick pins into her doll? And then to disfigure her like this? Would she have gotten into trouble over it? Or did she simply cover it with the dress and hope no one would notice? Suddenly Hannah put the doll down. Her hands were shaking, and she was very cold. The sensation lasted only a few seconds, but it left her feeling sick, as if she had handled something tainted. Something that had gone bad.
    Quickly she left the room, closing the door behind her.

Chapter Six
    A Grave Discovery
    T HE DRIZZLE PERSISTED THROUGH Sunday morning, and Hannah got down to more studying, reading through her notes and memorizing facts, dates, and figures until her brain felt as saturated as the atmosphere outside. But in the afternoon the weather cleared slightly, and she decided to take her sketch pad and go for a walk. Her mother was asleep in a chair, and Hannah closed the front door softly so as not to wake her.
    There were few people about. The streets here seemed quieter than those in her own neighborhood, the front gardens free from bikes and swing sets. If children lived here, they must be playing in parks or out for the day. The only sounds were from distant lawn mowers. Otherwise, houses dozed behind half-drawn blinds in the torpid sleepiness of an early-summer Sunday afternoon. She walked for about half a mile before coming to a largish redbrick church, with a gate set in a low wall and a signboard showing times of services. The church itself didn’t look very interesting, being Victorian like the houses it served, but it was surrounded by a neatly kept graveyard with flowering shrubs, a path, and one or two wooden seats.
    Having found in the past that churchyards sometimes made good drawing subjects, Hannah pushed open the gate and walked slowly along the path, glancing at the gravestones. Those nearest the church were the most recent, with sharp-edged lettering and fresh flowers in small wired pots. Farther back, the stones were older and the inscriptions harder to read. Soon Hannah found she had left the path and was wandering from grave to grave, reading names and dates and wondering how Maria Elizabeth Coombes—who had survived her husband, Albert Samuel Coombes, by more than thirty years—had coped with the rest of her life without him. Had she lovingly cherished his memory, bringing flowers to his grave each Sunday, waiting at last to join him? Or had she dried her eyes, shrugged her shoulders, and gone on with bringing up their seven children, all of whom were now buried nearby?
    Then there was Grace Amelia Mason, who didn’t appear to have had a husband at all and had died in 1903 at the age of forty-eight. Had she chosen not to marry, or had there been a fiancé who had died in a tragic accident, and Grace Amelia had sworn never to love another?
    And there were the tiny graves belonging to the very young children and the babies, some of whom had survived only a few days. Hannah’s thoughts went to her brother, Tom, born two years before her, who had lived for only six hours. Her mother had at last come to terms with his death, but she would never entirely get over it. Parents didn’t, it seemed. Looking at these small,