Wonder Show Read Online Free Page B

times and appealed to her, in his noxious way, to come up to the house. He had projects, he said, that involved documenting his family history and his own philosophies on matters of great importance, and he was in need of a smart girl to take dictation and assist in his research. Caroline repeated all of this to Portia, who rolled her eyes and expressed her belief that Mister’s reasons for wanting Caroline in the house had very little to do with research. Portia had often seen him watching Caroline from the door of the sewing room, through the trees in the orchard, across the pews during Sunday chapel.
    “Why would I tell him that?”
    Portia tapped one of Caroline’s smooth white hands. “Because you don’t want to ruin those with manual labor. Once we’re up there, I will do all the cooking and all the cleaning, and all you’ll have to do is assist him with his crazy projects. And neither one of us will ever have to pick another goddamned apple or hem another goddamned pair of pants.”
    A true entrepreneur, Mister had convinced the child welfare authorities that teaching his wards a trade and enabling them to work outdoors would ultimately benefit the girls and aid their “transformation into more productive members of society.” This was how sewing mail-order uniforms and harvesting apples in Mister’s family orchards had become mandatory for each and every resident of the McGreavey Home for Wayward Girls. Every resident, that is, except for the girls who were appointed to the household staff. And as hard as Caroline tried to sound disinterested, Portia knew exactly how much she hated sewing and picking apples.
    “Portia!” Caroline whispered. “Language!”
    Portia rolled her eyes. “Whatever way I say it, you know I’m right. We’d be free of this”—she waved her hands like a magician—“and we’d have a nice big roof over our heads again.”
    Caroline had lived in a large house before. Her family had money and the things that went with money, like feather beds and housekeepers and a deathly fear of scandal, which is why Caroline had been stashed away at The Home when rumors had begun circulating about her and the gardener’s son. “Only temporary,” Caroline’s mother said in all her letters. But it had been almost two years already, and Caroline was beginning to lose hope.
    “And,” Portia added, “won’t your mother be impressed when she hears you’ve moved from the orchard to the house?”
    Portia would later wonder whether she had been playing fair when she said that. There was nothing Caroline wanted more than for her mother to send one last letter calling her home. She prayed for it every night, the cement floor of the bunkhouse pressing her knees until they were numb, and sometimes in the mornings as well. She said her prayers in a near-silent whisper, but once in a while Portia would catch a phrase.
    “I’ll never see Daniel again,” Caroline promised. “I’ll do everything my mother says. Please, please, let me go home.”
    In the end, of course, Caroline’s mother did send one last letter. But that was not for several months. And by then the tiny pocket of hope that Caroline carried with her had drained itself empty as a broken hourglass.
    And the girls would all remember the version of Bluebeard that Portia had told them as they sewed the hems of relentless numbers of pant legs, the story starring Mister and his mysterious house, and they would shiver like dry leaves.

Portia
    I may not have been easy to care for, but I was surely not a wayward girl. I knew exactly where I wanted to be, and it wasn’t sleeping in a cabin at the bottom of Mister’s hill, picking apples from his gnarled trees, sewing uniforms until my fingers went numb, pretending to be grateful because he fed me and put a leaking roof over my head.
    Of course, I’d been nothing but a thorn in his side since I’d arrived (a fact that gave me particular pleasure, I confess). I was good at thinking of