Orchard Grove Read Online Free Page B

returning to this place where the apple trees have been ripped out to make way for homes and cute little families, she’s come full circle. It will become the place where she will beat another monster.
    Meet the new monster… same as the old monster…
    But for now, no one knows what happened on Orchard Grove back in the late 1970s and early Eighties, and no one ever will. Only she, her step-monster, an Albany Police Department Detective by the name of Miller, and the Devil know. And that’s enough.

B olstered by my crutches, I stood as straight and upright as possible inside the dining room, my eyes looking out the rear picture window onto the backyard and the invisible pot patch beyond the privacy fence. I inhaled and exhaled to calm my nerves, like I was only moments away from picking up my date for the junior prom.
    When I felt good enough about “me,” I carefully negotiated the two steps down into the den and opened the sliding glass doors. I stepped out onto the deck, leaned my bodyweight onto the crutches, looked up to the sky, felt the good warmth of the morning sun shining down upon my clean-shaven face. It was then that I heard the distinct and pretty sound of chirping and I was almost ashamed of myself for having forgotten what for the past two springs and summers had become my, let’s call it, fatherly duty.
    Nested inside a small hole up over my head in the aluminum soffit was a pair of robins that had been coming to this house to birth their babies for years now. The robins were so used to Susan and me at this point, they didn’t even fly away when we came outside onto the deck. Some of that had to do with familiarity and some of it had to do with the fact that I often fed them birdseed, especially when the momma robin was clearly with child. But since my foot operation, even a simple task like feeding the birds had become a project. Sometimes Susan fed the birds, but more often, she forgot all about it.
    Susan was a working girl after all.
    Now that I was outside however, I had no trouble with grabbing a scoop full of seed from the fifty pound bag that leaned up against a small metal shelf to my left, and reaching up into the round hole, gently depositing the food inside it, onto the flat interior aluminum panel. Almost immediately you could hear the robins pecking at the food, like I was their life savior, and I guess, in a way I was. But I’d grown to love those birds over the years, and who knows, maybe they loved me. This might seem a bit silly, but they are what we had in the place of children, and to be further honest, I sometimes worried about what would become of them when the day finally came for Susan and I to move out, and move on with our separate lives.
     
    I wiped my hands off on my jeans and once more inhaled and exhaled.
    Shifting my gaze over my right shoulder, I caught sight of her. With the wood stockade fence surrounding the perimeter of our property and a similar fence surrounding hers, I could only make out the upper portion of her body. The portion that enticed me the most since it was naked. The back of her head, the erect nipple-tipped left breast, her bare shoulders and arms.
    My breath escaped me. It was all I could do not to pass out on the spot.
    Shifting myself on my crutches so that I faced her property directly, I started to make my way across the wood deck in her direction. It was only a walk of maybe fifty or so paces, but it seemed like fifty miles.
    By the time I got to the other side of the house-length wood deck, I knew I’d crossed the point of no return. Lana was not only sexy and alluring, but she was intuitive too. I’ll say that for her. Because my deck was a good two or three feet higher than hers, it allowed me to peer over the tops of both privacy fences, down on her. All the time I had been hobbling my way across the deck, I sensed she knew her morning sunning routine was suddenly about to be intruded upon. It was as if I could see the fine hairs on her