Stranger in the House Read Online Free Page A

route home through the Stewart estate was long and meandering but it was a walk she always enjoyed. She followed the path through the gardens, skirted the frog pond, and wandered in the grape arbors until she came to the high hedges and the narrow stream that separated their properties.
    Anna decided, before she went in the house, to get a few vegetables from her garden for dinner. She was proud of her garden this year. She had culled a few tips from Henry and had raised a bountiful crop of vegetables. Everything had grown vigorously, probably because much of the garden plot had lain fallow for so many years. After harvesting two lustrous inky eggplants, a few tomatoes and a bunch of beans, Anna headed back toward the house. Sometimes, especially when the fall came, and Tracy returned to school, Anna thought about going back to work. She always decided against it, although she never admitted her real reason to Thomas. She wanted to be home, just in case. Just on the unlikely chance that Paul found his way back to them, she wanted to be there. Anna walked past the spot where the children’s play yard had been. She stopped and sank down on the rusty glider, staring dully at the patch of lawn. It was green now and planted over with flowers. I’d better not mention Paul’s birthday, she thought. Tom will only get upset.
    She knew how much he didn’t like to talk about it. But each year she felt compelled to bring it up, as if it were somehow vital that his parents speak his name aloud, acknowledge his birth. Every year Thomas would turn away from her with a grim look on his face. She didn’t do it to pain him. It just seemed that it was important. Then, last year, when she mentioned it, he had suddenly gotten angry.
    “Anna, I can’t stand it when you say that. Every year it’s the same thing. ‘Paul is eleven today. Paul is twelve today. It’s Paul’s thirteenth birthday.’ Why do you always have to mention it?”
    “Because it is his birthday,” she insisted. “Because I want to remember it.”
    “It’s like some grisly joke. Paul’s birthday. As if he were still alive and about to walk in that door.”
    “But, Tom,” she protested, “I do believe that he is alive. Don’t you? I mean, we don’t know any different. We need to have hope, darling.”
    But Thomas had turned away from her without another word, and the subject was closed between them once again, as it had been for most of the years since Paul was gone. She could not pinpoint the time when they had stopped discussing it. But the child’s disappearance had been like an amputation on the body of their marriage. Tom wanted to cover it, to hide it and pretend it hadn’t happened. Or so it seemed to Anna, as she restlessly sought help, advice, some reassurance that she would one day reattach what seemed irretrievably lost. As if by agreement, they avoided talking about it. It was the best they could do.
    Anna examined the ground from her seat on the glider, to see if any trace remained of the play fence, any faint outline of where it had been. The grass had grown over it. There was not a sign. It was as if it had never existed.
    Anna walked up to the back porch and entered the cool, quiet house. She placed the basket on the butcher block beside the sink and turned on the tap, placing a copper colander into the clean porcelain basin. The only sound in the house was the rush of the running water. Normally she liked nothing better than to be busy in her comfortable kitchen, but now a melancholy mood descended on her. She held her wrist under the water, like a mother testing a baby’s formula, and gazed over the plants on her windowsill into the stillness of the sun-dappled backyard.
    Suddenly she became aware of a sound like tapping. Turning off the water, she listened again. Someone was knocking at the front door. After wiping her hands off quickly on the soft terry towel next to the sink, she hurried through the house to the foyer and opened the