Skeleton Key Read Online Free

meeting some . In dazed silence she stepped into the dimness of a square entrance hall.
    The dark lady retreated before her with a stately tread, reminiscent of the chorus in Aïda . “P’fessah! P’fessah!” she boomed in her velvet voice, into the rear of the house. “She got here.” A far-away shout answered, unintelligibly, as Georgine followed her guide into a small, hot, drab living-room that looked as if nobody ever lived in it.
    The African Queen gestured nobly toward a chair. “There’s been so many disappointed him,” she remarked, “I was right glad to see you comin’ along the street, ringin’ do’bells. You lose the address?”
    There must be a catch in this , Georgine thought. “I—yes,” she said vaguely. “People were at home, I heard them, but no one answered the bell.”
    â€œMaybe you tried Frey’s.” The deep voice was respectfully soothing. “He’s stone deef. And the Gillespies, next to him, they unhitched the do’bell because Mr. Gillespie works nights.”
    So that was it; simple, normal, only Georgine hadn’t happened to think of it. Yet she gave a nervous start as another voice spoke from the doorway, “That’s all, Mrs. Blake,” it said, and the housekeeper strode magnificently out.
    The Professor was tall, bald and sixtyish. His sharp black eyes, narrowed in the hot glare from the window, looked Georgine over; once up, once down, He nodded, came briskly into the room and sat down on a straight chair. “Your name?” he snapped out.
    Georgine’s fingers moved toward the clasp of the little briefcase. She usually began by giving her name, though few forestalled her by asking. “Mrs. James Wyeth,” she said. Jim Wyeth had been dead for seven years, but to give her Christian name made her sound like a divorcee.
    â€œMine is Pah-eff, P-a-e-v,” said the Professor, adding angrily, “—the last young woman managed to misspell it in four several ways. Accuracy is my one desire.
    â€œNow; I’ll tell you at once that I pay by piecework. There are less than three hundred pages, and I will pay one hundred dollars for the job; one ribbon copy, two carbons. You must work here. Not one page, not one line is to go out of this house. Is that understood?”
    Out of this speech, delivered in a furious staccato, Georgine really heard only three words: one hundred dollars . Around her floated a vague impression that there had been a mistake after all, that Professor Paev wanted some typing done, that there were certain conditions; but that sum of money loomed in her mind like a glittering promise. She could type; she could earn it.
    One hundred dollars. It might be hay to some people, but it wasn’t to her. It was more than her entire monthly income from Jim Wyeth’s insurance, ten times as much as she earned in her best weeks at the subscription business. It would pay off almost all the debt owed to Barby’s doctor since last October, and Barby could have a new winter coat after all, and she, Georgine, could draw a few free breaths. With scarcely a pause, she said, “I understand.”
    It wouldn’t take more than ten days, surely. And she had ahead of her two weeks free of responsibility, for that morning she had seen her little girl start off with the family of a kind neighbor for her first vacation away from home. Georgine firmly believed that no child, however delicate, should become wholly dependent on its mother. It had startled her no little to find that the seven-year-old Barby shared this view, but that was beside the point. Everything was falling into place.
    Her shock of disappointment was therefore all the greater when she heard the Professor demanding, “Describe your knowledge of chemistry.”
    Bang went the doctor’s bill. “I had it for a year, in—in high school,” Georgine murmured.
    â€œHow much of