Good Hope Road: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

He waited until the Major had stepped outside, vaguely guilty as he watched him make his way through the dooryard. Only then did he head upstairs. He pulled out the book from the corner cupboard, shaking it to dislodge any insects that might be roosting within its pages despite the cedar roses that Ellie had thought to place along the shelves.
    He whacked it against the windowsill and a puff of rust-coloured rot rose from the leather spine. It hung in the air, soft and amorph- ous, before drifting down, obscuring and then revealing the blurred image of the Major through the thick-paned glass. Jim studied his father for an instant, watching as the Major stooped and fussed around the fruit trees that were trained over the stone walls of the orchard. He turned his attention back to the book. It was a cyclopedia of painters and paintings. He flipped through the plates of reproductions, and there she was, just as he’d remembered her.
    Venus Anadyomene .
    ‘ Aphrodite ’, the Major had pencilled in the margin. ‘ Made famous in a much-admired, now-lost painting by Apelles. Said to be inspired by Phyrne, the famous Greek courtesan, who, during the festivals of the Eleusinia and Poseidonia, was given to swimming in the sea, naked .’
    The woman in the black-and-white illustration was full-hipped and bare, squeezing the water from hair that hung over one shoulder. The lack of colour rendered the image flat, antiseptic, but nonetheless he still remembered the thrill he’d felt as a boy when he’d first happened upon her. The illicit tingle of pleasure as he’d taken in that expanse of unclothed skin.
    ‘It’s a very famous painting,’ the Major had explained to his young son. ‘Well, a painting of a painting, although no one knows for certain what the original looked like. Titian. He was the artist. His name also means “a shade of red”.’
    He’d said nothing in front of his father, but later, he’d stolen open the book and coloured in the woman’s hair and the tips of those perky, gloriously naked breasts with a stick of bright-red Crayola.
    A good thrashing it had earned him too, he remembered as he stared down at the page. Venus – or Aphrodite – who had once appeared so alluring now looked to him doughy and lumpen. The hair though . . . he touched a finger to it, tracing the strokes of red crayon, smudging the colour gently into the paper. A blue dress. A mane of red hair, tumbling down her back. He trailed his finger lower, down the exposed throat, to the chest, to the tips of the woman’s breasts.
    There was a flare in his groin. Suddenly restless, Jim shut the book with a snap and put it back in the cupboard, the rot settling on to his corduroys like soft, rust-coloured soot.
    The third time he saw her, it was in the woods again. When Ellie came in the following Wednesday to cook and tidy up the place, she told Jim about a bobcat sighting, over by the Garland place, said that her kid had mentioned it to her. He set out the next morning, not particularly hopeful of bagging the creature without a dog to trail and tree it. Still, a bobcat sighting could hardly be ignored, not with the bounty paid by the State for each furred head.
    He walked about the brush where the animal had last been sighted, methodically combing the ground. Sure enough, there they were: a neat set of tracks. His gut told him that if the cat was headed anywhere, it would be to the ridge that lay eastward, towards the river. Plenty of rocks and ledges there for resting places, and the wetlands teeming with hares and such for prey.
    The problem was, the ridge lay plumb on the Garland property. It didn’t seem like anyone was around though, not this early anyhow. The Garlands usually just came up from the city in the summer . . . He hesitated, only momentarily, before crossing the dirt road and passing the posted trees that marked the land as private property.
    The acre or so of woodland that skirted the road lay in a depression. Filled