Ozark Trilogy 3: And Then There'll Be Fireworks Read Online Free Page A

this one throw of the dice, and Granny Hazelbide shivered with more than the fever that plagued her now every day of her life, thinking what she’d done if it was the wrong choice and she had convinced the others of it. And what they’d do to her ... law, that would be a production!
    “Ah, Hazelbide,” said Granny Willowithe, her that almost never spoke, and had done her grannying in the farther reaches of the Kingdom where there were few to bother her, “if you are wrong! ” It was always that way. Those as spoke rarely, when they did speak it tended to be significant—and to be what everybody else was thinking and hadn’t gotten up gumption to give voice to.
     
    Troublesome of Brightwater woke to a wind howling round her cabin doors and windows, and that was ordinary enough. She woke also to a downright infuriated rapping on her cabin door, and that was distinctly not ordinary. Over ten years she’d been here now, and she’d never had a visitor but her little sister, and that only three times. It could not be her little sister this time. She listened again, and stretched in the warmth of her bed, wondering if it had been maybe something blown by the winds, or something in a dream, half a mind to go back to sleep. And then the hollering came:
    “Troublesome of Brightwater, will you open this door? Or have you taken to murdering old ladies along with the rest of your wicked ways?”
    That brought her up out of her bed in a hurry. Old ladies, was it, on her doorsill? She went to the door just as she was, and stood there before them mother-naked and barefoot, with no cover but the heavy black hair that tumbled almost to her knees. She held the door with one hand and set the other on the curve of her shameless hip, and she sighed a sigh of sheer wonderment.
    “Whatever in all the world?” breathed Troublesome of Brightwater, looking them over. “Whatever in all the wondering twelvesquare world?”
    The Grannys were a sight to behold, for sure. They were wet and they were dirty and they were nettlestung, and they were cold and wrinkled and miserable. With no more Housekeeping Spells to use, and nothing around for a tidy-up but one stream the width of their hand trickling over slabs of bare rock, they were as pitiful a representation of seven old ladies as had ever met the eye.
    “Out of my way, trollop,” announced Granny Gableframe, and would of pushed right past Troublesome into the welcome warmth of the cabin; but the young woman barred her way with one sturdy arm.
    “I’m no trollop, Granny Gableframe,” she said. “I’m virgin as I came from my mother’s womb—and that’s more than any one of you here can say back at me, as I recollect. As for my costume, I don’t recall sending out any invitations. You’ve gotten potluck, Grannys.”
    “Law, the creature’s enjoying it,” muttered Granny Hazelbide. She’d had the raising of her , too. “Troublesome,” she demanded, “will you for the love of decency drop that arm and let us in? We are tired near to death, we spent all yesterday on this mountain and all last night in a cave full of varmints and dripping water, and we’ve no magic any more to ease the toll all that has taken. Would it pleasure you to see one of us drop dead right here before your eyes, you dreadful female?”
    Troublesome dropped her arm at that and let them by, saying: “Well, that’s more fair. A trollop I’m not, but a dreadful female I’m willing to admit to. Do come in, and I’ll put the kettle on and stir up the fire. I don’t suppose youall’d take your clothes off and let me hang them to dry, would you?”
    That met the frigid silence she’d anticipated, and she nodded her head in resignation.
    “Stay cold and wet, then,” she said, “and die of pneumonia, not on my doorstep but on my hearthstone—but don’t you lay it to my account. There’s not a one of you as has anything different to her body than I have myself, and I do believe I could bear the