Poe Read Online Free Page B

off to an English boarding school until she was eighteen and ready to be married to a respectable oil tycoon ten years her senior.
    Captain Aspinwall apparently didn’t have enough cash to fix the mansion, a dictatorship in Guatemala having put a dent in the family business. Delia, rich and unforgiving, was unwilling to lend the money. So there the house sat, home to mice and climbing ivy, until her father finally passed away in the seventies from a well-deserved bout of liver cancer. (What was left of his wealth had been blown on expensive Scotch whisky.) Delia unloaded the mansion for the first lowball offer she got, from a couple of hippies fresh from Amherst College who wanted to start a New England commune.
    But—and here comes tragic death number seven—at Aspinwall the hippy dude was apparently killed by an animal, possibly a bear but more likely a rabid dog, and that was the end of that. There was talk of razing the building to the ground, but although it was officially condemned, there wasn’t enough tax revenue for the demolition, so Aspinwall stood. Of course, with a tragic fire and grisly deaths, ghost stories ran rampant, and many of the aforementioned drunk teenagers claim to have heard footsteps, been attacked by an invisibleentity, and seen lights flicker, even though electricity hasn’t run to the place since Carter was president. The horror, however, apparently isn’t enough to put an end to the midnight bashes.
    Suddenly I hear a car slowly making its way down the street. It’s a battered Ford Escort that was probably white at one point in the distant past and has a right front tire that’s going flat. Maddy.
    But no, the person who gets out of the car is definitely not a sixty-year-old psychic. She’s young—my age, maybe younger—with long auburn hair, ultra-short bangs, green Lennon glasses, and ripped jeans. She wears a bright red wool hat, navy-blue scarf, and actual mittens.
    “Hey! You must be Dimitri,” she says, and I immediately recognize her smoky voice. Shit, she’s better looking than I imagined.
    “Lisa?”
    She smiles and walks forward, holding out a mittened hand. I take it. “Nice to finally meet you in person,” she says.
    “What are you doing here?” I ask and then immediately wish I hadn’t, because damn, what do I care?
    “I’m crashing your spooky party,” she says. “Plus I forgot to warn you about the floorboards. A lot of places in there where you could fall through.”
    “How do you know?” Stupid, stupid questions.
    “Oh, I used to come here,” she says, charmingly shifting from one foot to the other. “You know, high school keggers.”
    “I didn’t know that.”
    She shrugs, looks almost pensive for a moment, and wraps a tendril of her hair behind her ear. “Not that I was partying. I was in a band at the time.”
    “You sing?”
    “Nah,” she says, “I drum.”
    Awkward pause.
    The phrase “out of my league” doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel at this particular moment in time. And before I can come upwith something witty and insightful to say (I’m mentally trying to scan the last issue of the New Yorker I read, oh, six months ago), another car pulls up, this time a massive black SUV with military-grade round headlights. Behind it trails a beige Pinto that sputters and stalls in the middle of the road.
    “Shakespeare!” shouts Nate, jumping out of the black SUV. Lisa looks at me curiously.
    Nate pulls out a giant camouflage backpack, looking like he’s ready to hike the Seven Summits, shoot some commies, or drop out of a helicopter into enemy territory. My messenger bag now looks like a man purse.
    “You Shakespeare’s girlfriend?” he says as he approaches, seeing Lisa.
    “Friend,” says Lisa, neatly putting her hands in her back pockets.
    “Right,” Nate says, keeping his gaze directly at breast level. “What’d you say your name was again?”
    “I didn’t,” she replies coolly. No mittened handshake for you, Nate.