Dreamland Lake Read Online Free Page A

There’d be these sudden gusts of wind like little cyclones of leftover leaves, making me think of the dead man. Everything did.
    The route starts with Union Avenue, which has a lot of old, gray, frame houses leaning toward each other right next to the sidewalk. My dad used to say they’d been a string of sporting houses until my mom said she didn’t see any reason why sporting houses needed to be mentioned. Now, they’re divided up into apartments so I could unload three or four papers on each porch and get the load down to where I could handle it better.
    Then you crossed a sort of invisible frontier and made a sharp angle onto Prairie Avenue. This is sort of old-time, classy Dunthorpe. Not as classy as Dunthorpe Boulevard, which wasn’t on our route, but classy enough. Big houses here, strung out with long lawns divided by hedges that made me a little nervous. The porches were dark. At the old Smythe place, thewind was making the porch swing squeak back and forth—like something invisible was sitting out there, catching a breath of early morning air. I skimmed the paper across the porch floor there without coming all the way up the steps.
    It was between the Smythes and the Garrison place that I began to think somebody was tailing me. I stopped, but I didn’t look back. I thought I heard a couple more footfalls, but then they stopped too.
    To make things worse, the Garrison place was the biggest pile on the block—with a drive curving around the house and a garage way back behind it with rooms up above for the chauffeur. He took the paper too, so you had to walk way back in there between the hedges.
    Usually, this was my favorite part of the route because Old Lady Garrison had this classic Lincoln Continental that stood out there in the drive ready to take her to church. Not that Old Lady Garrison knew she had a classic car. She may have thought it was still new. There were always plenty of rumors about her, which I tended to believe at the time. Like she was off her head and that the chauffeur had to dress her—talk like that. But she had a claret-red, mint-condition, 1947 Lincoln Continental. Usually, I took a break then and just ran my hand over the sweep of the fenders and dreamed about driving it.
    Not that morning, though. She could have had a museum-quality, 1930 straight-eight, 145-H.P., boat-tailed Packard Speedster in fire-engine red, and I wouldn’t have given it the time of day.
    I started back toward the street. But Old Lady Garrison’s driveway was crushed white rock so it made noisy walking. When I got around to the front of the house, I stopped and looked up and downPrairie Avenue. It was just daylight. As far as I could see in both directions, nobody was around. So, I crunched on out the drive to the sidewalk. Just as I came around the hedge, somebody who was squatting down behind it stood up—about a foot away from my right ear.
    It was Flip.
    Not that I knew him in the first second, though. I jumped up in the air and came down with a grunt of real terror. Papers went all over the hedge. And the minute I saw who it was, I could have pushed his sassy face in. But he just said, “Thought you might like a little company this morning.”
    Then he took the papers for the other side of the street, and we were done in half the time. I didn’t say much. Being Flip, he had to stage something dramatic, like making a sudden appearance. But then, he knew I’d be glad he was there after the first shock wore off. What can you do with a guy like that? I never could handle him.
    It was when we were on the way home and the sun was up that Flip gave me the second scare of the day. The Catholics were already out, on their way to seven a.m. Mass at St. Anthony’s. It was a nice, bright Sunday morning. I was even considering telling Flip about my nightmare of OLD BONES AT THE WINDOW with the hope that maybe he might have had a restless night or two himself. Though I doubted it. When he said in his off-handed