Libby on Wednesday Read Online Free Page A

anger. And while Graham McCall’simmense old house might not make much sense in many ways, it did make an excellent racetrack.
    From the Great Hall she would burst out across the wide entry area and into the library. Gathering speed in the straightaway between the high bookshelves and the refectory table, she would careen into Graham’s study, a round room formed by the lowest floor of the tower. There, a quick spin around the huge old desk put her on the track to race down the window side of the library and out into the hall again.
    The stairs came next, where a great deal of angry energy could be consumed by jumping up the wide, curving stairway two steps at a time. The poolroom and upstairs sitting room went by at full speed, but skillful cornering was needed to negotiate the long, narrow balconies that overhung the parlor.
    Up on the third floor she would shoot down the narrow hall between small rooms that had once been servants’ quarters but now held only Libby’s private collections. The temporary ones (at the moment ancient Greece, the pioneers, and the British Empire) and the best and biggest and most permanent, her America in the 1930s collection.
    The home stretch was a daring plunge down two flights of back stairs, to shoot out across the dining room and back to the starting point of the race. And it was a race, even though the only prize was an exhausted truce with herself, or with the cruel fate that sometimes seemed to spoil things just to make her angry.
    Sometimes it was necessary to go over the course several times, and the family, sitting in the Great Hall or library, would look up each time she flashed by—curious but notparticularly concerned. At least not since Mercedes consulted her psychiatrist and was told it was probably a healthy form of therapy, as long the runner was reasonably surefooted—which Libby certainly was. So they all went on calmly reading or talking, although now and then as she skidded around a corner or rocketed through a doorway, someone would call after her, “What went wrong this time, dear?” But she seldom stopped to answer, or at least not until she was forced to, paralyzed and calmed by exhaustion.
    For a moment the urge was there, the old familiar need to do something headlong and full-tilt, but her feet refused to begin. Perhaps she was too old now. Or maybe it was because an “exasperation run” about the writers’-workshop catastrophe would be like admitting that it was no worse than those other unimportant little frustrations of her childhood. Instead she turned and with a slow, measured tread—a funeral procession or the march of the doomed to the gallows—went out into the hall and up the grand, curving stairway. On the landing, halfway up the stairs, she stopped long enough to tell her grandfather that she blamed him too.
    Of course Graham McCall, who had been dead for over ten years, wasn’t really there to be told in person. But his portrait hung above the landing, a life-size oil painting of the famous writer and world traveler, dramatically posed in khakis, jodhpurs, and pith helmet. When she was very young, Libby had held frequent conversations with Graham’s portrait, long, involved discussions on every kind of subject. That was another habit she had more or less outgrown, except on rare occasions such as this, when shestill had a few special comments to make to Graham McCall.
    “It’s all your fault, really,” she told him. “At least it was to begin with. None of it would have happened if you’d just been something normal, like a farmer or a businessman.”
    But now, perhaps because of her own feelings of resentment, Graham’s smile, which she had once thought kindly and understanding, seemed cold and mocking. Tossing her head, she glared at him angrily before she turned away and went on up the stairs, not even looking back, as she usually did, to watch the way the portrait’s eyes seemed to follow as you climbed upward. At the top of the