Free Quiet Neighbors by Catriona McPherson Page A

“I’d have said a librarian and a bookseller were kissing cousins.” He looked around himself. “Perhaps not though.”
    â€œAnyway, the dead room ?” asked Jude. “Is that what you said a minute ago?”
    Lowell gave her a shrug and a sheepish smile. “I can’t say no,” he said. “Sometimes the relatives still have tears standing in their eyes when they bring the bulging bagfuls round. I can’t just say ‘no time to sort them; take it all to the dump,’ now can I? But once I’ve accepted them, I can’t let the grieving children see the books just lying around.”
    â€œSo what’s all that then?” said Jude, pointing at the choked passageway.
    â€œKindles and divorce,” Lowell said. “They don’t count.” He had finished unwrapping the Audubon, and he took his spectacles from his breast pocket and hooked the wires round his ears. “My precious,” he said in a voice that left Jude halfway between laughter and alarm.
    â€œYou’re an enigma, Lowland Glen,” she said. “So do you get many grieving children coming round?”
    She never forgot it. Those words were still hanging in the air when the street door opened. The words were in the air, Lowell was wearing his reading glasses, and she, Jude, had just decided she could cope with the “dead room.” Was patting herself on the back for taking it in her stride.
    â€œOh! Oh!” Lowell said. He slumped in his chair and his face drained until it matched the fawn cardigan on the seat back.
    â€œAh!” said Jude. She recognised it as the girl turned away to close the door. It was too small to be a jacket and too long to be a face; it was a sheet of hair as black as a witch’s cat, still wet at the tips from her skulking in the garden.
    As the girl turned back to face them, Lowell pushed his spectacles up his forehead and rubbed one of his large, papery hands over his jaw.
    â€œDear me,” he said. “You remind me of someone I … ” Then the words died in his mouth.
    She was ethereally thin, small and bird-boned, but her belly stuck out in front of her as round as an apple.
    â€œNo,” Jude breathed, and she knew from the twitch of Lowell’s forehead that he had heard her.
    The girl picked her way towards them between the books. Her eyes were wide with fear and her chest was hitching with each breath, but she spoke with a voice as clear as a bell, liquid and warm, with an accent Jude couldn’t place.
    â€œAre you Lowell Glen?” she said. Jude saw him nod once and saw too that the hand resting on the Audubon was shaking. “Well, then, I think you’re my dad.”

Seven
    For the next few hours Jude was underwater. Or no, not that exactly. More as if she’d been put in Plexiglas. She was the decoration in a paperweight, and everyone could see her and she could see out and she could almost hear too, but a dull plug of sour plastic filled her and a dome of it surrounded her and nothing could touch her through it and even if she hurled herself at a wall, nothing would shatter her free or even make a crack she could scream through.
    As soon as the girl spoke, Lowell leapt to his feet and led her by one of her pale tapering hands to his chair. Was she warm enough? Could he put a hassock under her feet? She was fine; her ankles were fine. Lowell nodded, frowning. He knew she might want her feet up, but he didn’t know why.
    As she was settling herself back, patting the rosy cheek of the apple, Jude turned away—lurched away, really—and filled the kettle, splashing her face with cold water and drying it on the tea towel, always slightly sour from the way it hung in its damp folds from a cup hook.
    â€œTea?” she said, coming back with a smile.
    The girl nodded. Her shoulders dropped; even her eyelids drooped as she relaxed, and she took a huge gusty breath in and almost laughed as she