June Read Online Free Page B

state; she could see this clearly now that Nick Emmons had followed her inside.
    She reached for the banister just as her eyes adjusted. An inheritance, from a relative? But it didn’t have to do with Two Oaks? What could that mean? A mistake, most likely; she didn’t have any relatives to speak of. Or maybe it was some kind of scam. Maybe Nick Emmons was a stalker, someone who smelled just like Aaron Wilson-Myers precisely because he knew Cassie would go weak in the knees for a man who smelled like Aaron Wilson-Myers, and he was soundlessly slipping up the stairs behind her. At the landing now, she glanced back in alarm, but no, there Nick was, just where she’d left him, turning in wonder at the vast foyer above him, at the curved pocket doors of the round office, at the brass lion’s head on the front doorplate, as though he’d never been anywhere so beautiful, and Cassie felt unexpectedly flattered and undeniably proud.

Cassie dressed from the dirty pile that had been growing like mold around the outskirts of her bedroom. Once decent, she pushed the weeks’ worth of unwashed detritus into the wardrobe, and the rest of it to the far side of her bed, just in case Nick happened to peek in. She laughed at her strange logic. Why would he ever just peek in? Then she made the bed. Why was she making the bed? Why did she feel the need to sniff her armpit and dab on Secret? She was not going to sleep with Nick Emmons, a man she did not know, a man with a message about some mysterious inheritance. She went to the mirror and pulled her hair into a greasy ponytail.
    Instead of heading back down the master staircase, Cassie padded across the open upstairs hall, lit by the three fleur-de-lised stained-glass windows in yellow, grass, and rose. She passed three of the home’s ample bedrooms, then turned in to the tight, dark passageway that led, to the left, toward the servant hall and stairs, and, straight ahead, into the fourth, underfurnished bedroom.
    Into the ruddy servant hall she went. The red pine that lined the walls reminded her, uncomfortably, of a coffin, especially as she glanced into the maid’s room and wondered what it must have been like to sleep every night in that tight box above the kitchen.
    There’d been a black maid at Two Oaks once, if Cassie was remembering right. Cassie had seen a picture in one of her grandmother’s albums. The woman was very old, older looking than Cassie’s grandmother had been when she died, hunched and gnarled and skinny but dressed in an apron. To think of making an old lady cook and clean for you. “It was different then,” her grandmother had explained primly when Cassie asked. “She’d been at Two Oaks for years. Where would you have her go?” And Cassie had bitten her lip about rich, male racists; one never questioned her grandmother’s precious uncle Lem, even though he was sixty years gone.
    At the lip of the stairs, Cassie leaned forward and listened for Nick. Nothing. She checked the window; the side street was empty, as it always was this time of day, just porches and lawns, everyone either at their jobs down at the plant or crocheting blankets in front of their morning shows. She wondered if anyone had taken notice of her gentleman caller. She supposed they couldn’t think any worse of her, the wayward granddaughter of St. Jude’s most upstanding citizen. Everyone knew that she hadn’t made it back in time to do much except sit by the old woman’s bedside. In the grocery store, or as they eyed her from their front porch swings, she resisted the urge to cry out that it wasn’t her fault; her grandmother had kept news of the brain cancer from her. But of course Cassie knew it ran deeper than that, that plenty of things were her fault, and even if she hadn’t delivered her grandmother to a painful, lonely death, she’d done plenty to contribute to the disappointing, lonely life that had immediately preceded it.
    Cassie stepped down gingerly—the stairs were