The Body in the Lighthouse Read Online Free

“Cereal is cereal,” Faith told him as she dug into it, nevertheless, savoring the rich real whipped cream piled on top. Tom had asked for two spoons. He was very good about sharing food, which was Faith’s number one criterion in evaluating a candidate for marriage. Forget communication, compatibility in bed, solvency, et cetera. Will this potential partner for life give you abite—or say something like “If you wanted it, you should have ordered it”? It was a simple, easy test, one that answered all the other questions. Selfish with food, selfish with…
    Back at the cottage, Tom pitched the mothball-laden bags gently into the crawl space while Faith packed up their things for the stay at Ursula’s.
    â€œThey’re nocturnal, so we won’t know until morning if they’re gone. I told Lyle I’d call him before six. Everyone’s ready to get back to work once they get the all clear.”
    Faith felt oddly reluctant to leave. It was so beautiful—and it was theirs. The evergreens, birches, bayberries, even the invasive alders—and the view. She wanted the crew to finish as soon as possible. If the mothballs didn’t work, they’d try the other stuff. Beer? Get the skunks pie-eyed and trap them? Dried blood? Gross them out? And then there was always Len…
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    How could she have hesitated for even one second before deciding to come to the Pines? Faith wondered as she finished cleaning up the kitchen after dinner. Gert had left the pie, also fresh haddock, which Faith had pan-fried in one of the iron skillets that hung on the wall. They ranged in size from one just right for a single fried egg to a behemoth that took up two burners. She had also steamed some new potatoes and added them to the pan when they were soft, letting them get crusty in the sizzling butter. Pix and Ursula had put up dilly beans last summer, and these completed the meal. Neither kid had spilled milk at dinner, and in general, they had behaved beautifully, as was always the case when it was not their boring—or worse—same old family alone. Tom had taken them to explore the tide pools and the old lighthouse farther up the beach while Faith got dinner. Ursula had set the table, then come into the kitchen to keep Faith company. Now she was playing Chinese checkers with Ben while Tom put Amy to bed. It was all like something out of Gene Stratton Porter. And there were plenty of her works, as well as those by everyone from Will Shakespeare to Louise Dickinson Rich, lining the bookshelves all over the house. It was one of those houses where nothing that came in ever went out, unless consumed, and vintage Lincoln Logs cohabited happily with LEGO Technics on the shelves devoted to children’s amusements. That’s how Ursula had referred to them, turning the kids loose. “These are the shelves filled with children’s amusements.” To amuse themselves, the adults had the books, of course—and jigsaw puzzles, board games, flower presses, shell collections, material to make a quilt, knit a sweater, embroider a tablecloth, build a model boat, carve a bird, and paint or take a picture. The efforts of a number of generations decorated the house. Faith thought of the apartment in Manhattan that had been her childhood home, where her parents still lived—a prewar duplex on the Upper East Side. Suddenly, she would have traded its tasteful appointments—Jane Sibley had exquisite taste—for awall hung with odes to the woods scrawled in childish hands and framed by birch bark, as well as with photographs of everyone lined up on the front porch, the uncomfortable wicker and Bar Harbor rockers in the same places as they had been when Faith had walked up the stairs that afternoon—only the photo was from 1925. Was this what mid-thirties meant? The chronological age, that is? Was she suddenly going to start a fern collection, save all the kid’s drawings, not