The Long Way Home Read Online Free Page A

outside onto a small porch where she found nothing but a stack of wood. Like the shutters and the downstairs rooms, the porch needed a fresh coat of paint.
    The yard was much deeper and wider than it looked from the house. Remnants of garden beds ran along the porch, the right side of the property, and the outbuilding—carriage house? garage?—that faced the driveway. A large shed with a door flanked by a window on each side stood in the back corner. She’d leave investigating that for another day. And there were those trees, huge things with long bare branches.
    Bare branches where there’d been leaves not too long ago—but where were the leaves? She stepped off the porch and walked the length of the yard. She thought of the lawns she’d passed on her way into town, where the fallen leaves had carpeted the ground. Not here, though. She looked up at the trees and wondered if they were dead. She reached up to break a twig from the closest maple, and found it supple, not dry as one might expect from a dead tree. So where were the leaves?
    A trip around the yard revealed a thick layer covering the flower beds.
    Birdseed on the ground under the feeders that hung from the branches of several dogwoods meant that someone had filled them.
    Raked leaves. Filled bird feeders. Wood stacked near the back door.
    She glanced at the house nervously. Could someone be inside, hiding, perhaps, on the second floor? A squatter, maybe, someone who knew the house was empty, had been empty for years?
    There was an outside entrance to the basement, double wooden doors that were God knows how old. Maybe …
    Ellie took a deep breath and walked to the doors and gave one a good yank—but they didn’t budge.
    “Okay, locked is good.”
    She went back up the steps and stared at the pile of wood. Must have been Jesse, she decided. Of course. Hadn’t he said they’d been looking out for the place? She hadn’t thought that would mean raking the leaves into the flower beds and keeping the bird feeders filled, but those were nice touches. She exhaled and went back inside, making certain she relocked the door.
    She walked softly on leather-soled flats back to the foyer. At the bottom of the steps she stood, as if listening, waiting to see if there was any sound from the second floor. Convinced there were no squatters—surely Jesse would have noticed—she climbed the steps slowly, almost on tiptoe. At the top of the stairs was a landing and a hall that, much like the one below, led to the back of the house. She counted thedoors—there were five, all closed. Her hand paused at the one closest to her before grasping and turning it. She pushed it open and peered inside.
    “More sheets. Where,” she wondered, “did they find so many sheets?”
    The wallpaper was peeling from one corner, the flowers fading to the palest of yellows. She picked up a strip that had flaked off and fallen to the floor. The flowers, like the teacups on the paper in the kitchen, seemed to ring a very distant bell in her memory. She slipped the paper into her pocket and left the room.
    One by one she opened the other doors, took a long studied look inside before closing them again. There were four good-size bedrooms and one large bath accessed from the hall. Two of the bedrooms had their own baths, all were fully furnished and had closets. Ellie resisted the temptation to open those doors, not sure of what she’d find hanging there.
    She stood on the landing, looking at the doors she’d moments earlier opened then closed. She had to pick one to sleep in, and she needed to do that now so she could find sheets—
no problem there
—and hopefully, blankets. All of the bed linens would have to be washed, of course. Did this house have a washer and a dryer? She hadn’t seen one on the first floor. Perhaps in the basement.
    The basement where the squatters were hiding.
    “You’re being ridiculous. You’ve got the imagination of a ten-year-old,” Ellie chastised herself