Unhinged Read Online Free PDF Page B

exactly an answer. He wore a navy T-shirt, jeans, and a very nice, newish-looking pair of rubber-soled boots. “Want to come in, see what I’ve done so far?”
    City accent; Brooklyn with the softening that came from time away from the old neighborhood, talking to lots of people.
    “Harry,” Ellie began, “it’s very nice to meet you. And we’d like to see the house, but right now I think we ought to . . .”
    Lie down,
she was telegraphing sternly at me.
Fall onto the sofa and stay there until I say you can get up.
    That plan still seemed prudent to me. But I wanted to go inside even more now that I saw Harry was getting rid of things.
    “Please?” He looked from one to the other of us. “I do need someone to say I wasn’t crazy to buy this old wreck.”
    “You’re on,” I replied heartily as we picked our way up the steps and over the death-trap porch.
    “Phewie.” Ellie wrinkled her nose when we got inside. “Dust. And what’s the other smell?”
    “Forty years of eating out of cans, and keeping the cans,” Harry replied somberly. “Rinsing them wasn’t a specialty, either. This,” he waved around, “is an improvement over when I got here.”
    Cracked linoleum curled up from the slanting floor; on it rested an old white-metal sink unit with most of the porcelain chipped off. Loops of once-bright wallpaper festooned in greasy ringlets over the stove, a crusted horror. The ancient plaster ceiling was disintegrating; gritty bits of it crunched under our feet.
    “I gather the previous owner was . . . unusual,” Harry said carefully.
    “Don’t worry,” I said. “We knew she was off the deep end. I guess you’re living in there?”
    I pointed at the dining room. Its formal character and the fact that it’s used least makes it the last room to get seriously ravaged in many old houses.
    “Yep,” he replied. “I think she did, too. Live in it, at the end. I’ve cleaned it up a little better.”
    We followed him down a hall between stacks of, apparently, every issue of every newspaper ever published: tabloids, special editions, even the
Sporting News,
many with bits clipped out.
    “I need to get a recycling truck over here,” Harry said with a wave at them. “She seems to have been quite the news junkie.”
    “And a junk junkie.” Pails filled with ancient, mummified chicken bones gave me a start. In the gloom they looked like tiny human skeletons. Everything was covered with a thick, feltlike coating of dust, glued down I imagined by decades of Harriet’s sour, increasingly suspicious exhalations.
    Then I peered into the dining room, caught my breath in surprise. “Oh, Harry! This is . . . This is fabulous.”
    As if someone had waved a magic wand, the old hardwood floor shone, smelling of lemon wax. The hearth gleamed, brass andirons polished and laden with birch logs. An elegant little chandelier twinkled prettily, its crystal pendants ammonia-fresh.
    “Not too shabby?” Harry beamed with justifiable pride. He’d set up a bedstead, a table and chair, and a bench on which he had laid out some books and a lamp. A radio stood on the newly wiped sill of one glittering-clean window.
    Something else stood there, too.
    From Harriet’s window you could see straight into many other houses in town. When she wasn’t reading newspapers she’d probably sat right in this room writing letters about what she’d observed. And although I’d expected to find her most treasured possession sooner or later, coming upon it now made my heart lurch.
    “Oh,” Ellie pronounced comprehendingly, seeing it with me:
    The one thing Harriet wouldn’t have abandoned. Because even if she ran off and started a new life, somehow—
    Well, what could life possibly be to Harriet Hollingsworth without her binoculars?
     
     
    When I first came to Maine and bought an old house I learned the most important part of do-it-yourself fix-up: knowing when not to. Unfortunately I learned this by falling through a floor I’d