Free Agnes Mallory by Andrew Klavan Page A

let me keep it too. It would be worth – what? – about two million dollars by now. Unfortunately, that autumn —just around the same time I was flipping my baseball card collection into piles of burning leaves – I accidentally knocked the skull from my shelf and it was dented by the fall. Somehow, when I picked it up, when I saw how lopped it was, I became fascinated. My thumb, as if of its own volition, slowly burrowed into the skull’s side, making it crumble, the clay having dried. Then, in a trance, I crushed the thing, and rolled the hardened bits into a clump. After that, I played with it for a few minutes distractedly, and finally threw it into the trash.
    But not that afternoon. I carried it home carefully that afternoon. I held it balanced on my palm. Going over and over its ghostly eyes with my own, admiring the detail of its evil grin. No one had one like it, no one – on Long Island, in the whole world – it was a oner. God, if she weren’t a girl, and such a spooky girl, and so mysterious and so hard to approach for things, she could have made a million cool things – we could’ve set up a stand outside my house, like a lemonade stand – we’d have made enough money to buy a car or something … But that was just a thought. I was content enough. Absorbed in contemplation of the thing and with wisps of Agnes’s creepy dream drifting across my imagination and with that incandescent, floaty Walk-Home-From-Agnes’s feeling permeating the periphery of verdant foliage and scrabbling squirrels and summer sky. Raising my eyes as I came home to Old Colony Lane was like being interrupted from a TV show or a good book. There was my house suddenly barging in on my meditations. A big, homey colonial – white clapboards, green shutters – it seemed strangely unfamiliar to me for half a second. And, as I came around the hedges, there was something else – something really unfamiliar that brought me out of my revery the rest of the way. Another car was in the driveway. A family-style Ford of some kind, a Thunderbird I think, shiny and blue but stodgy in a way – and anyhow a foreigner, an intruder in the house, which made me grimace when I saw it.
    I remembered who it was, though. My mother had mentioned it to me a week or so before: my Aunt May had finally come for her visit. She was going to be staying with us for quite some time.

‘I cannot, cannot tell you how happy I am – how happy I am now that this is over. This is the thing I dreaded above all else, above everything, being alone like this, and now that it’s finally here I feel so – so free! I just can’t tell you.’
    Even I knew she was beautiful, even then. And glamor came off her in waves like perfume. The magazine-cover makeup that preserved her flushed-ivory complexion, the low front of her navy summer dress and her ensorcelling cleavage through a fringe of lace, her bare arms and the movement of her arms and the dramatic phrases she used and the smell of her, even a little too much fragrance in an aggressively feminine cloud around her: it all made her seem spotlit to me. The grand sideboard behind her, ranged with display plates and pewterware, became a sort of dim backdrop. My mother and father, at either end of the dining-room table, seemed to fade into the shadowy wings. And I, sitting across from her in the elegant and windowless alcove we used for company, could only finger my crystal of Seven-up and occasionally chew the lump of pot roast lying on my lower jaw like lead, and try and fail and try again not to stare at her.
    â€˜Well, I never should have gone back to him. Oh God, it was the mistake of a lifetime. But, I mean, picture the scene: with me all alone and no money and nowhere to go, poor thing. You can’t imagine it, Claire: you’re so lucky, with Michael and Harry and a house and a life like this. Well, I wanted some of those things too,