Free Spirit by Graham Masterton

the church had never been so well attended, especially by eyelash-fluttering adolescent girls.
    The three girls kept on turning around and giving Dick Bracewaite little finger-waves, until they turned the corner into Oak Street, where they collapsed into fits of laughter.
    â€˜Oh, I love him! I love him!’ said Molly, dancing around and around and swinging her school bag. Molly was big and freckly, with hair like a bomb-burst in a copper-wire factory, and she was in love with everybody, especially Dick Bracewaite and Frank Sinatra.
    Oak Street was neat and hot and empty, apart from Mr Stillwell’s green delivery truck parked outside the Stillwell Hardware Store; and Mrs Miller’s station-wagon parked in the shade of the large post oak that stood beside the Sherman Grocery, and which had given Oak Street its name. Mrs Miller’s chocolate-coloured spaniel sat in the back of the station-wagon with its lurid pink tongue hanging out like a brush salesman’s necktie.
    There was a feeling of timelessness; as if this summer would never end; and Oak Street would always remain the same, ‘as common and familiar as my breath’ as Thomas Wolfe had put it. But Elizabeth had lately become aware that
she
was changing. She felt a funny sort of swelling balloon-like tension inside her – and a strange feeling of
bewilderment
, as if she ought to know something, as if she really ought to understand something, but couldn’t quite grasp what it was. In less than amonth’s time, she would be thirteen. To her own surprise, she had lost all interest in her dolls. She had tried very hard to play with them. But even those dolls which she had once adored the most, and to whom she had once confided all of her secrets, now seemed to be lifeless and unco-operative and ineffably stupid. Even the tiny, imaginary family which had once lived in her doll’s house appeared to have moved out, without leaving a forwarding address.
    All that interested Elizabeth now was love and romance; love, and romance, and horses.
    She read every novel that she could find, from Emily Brontë to Sinclair Lewis. The more romantic they were, the more tragic they were, the more she adored them. Her particular favourite was
Anna Karenina
, which made her cry, especially when Anna was killed by a train. But she also loved Esther Summerson, in Dickens’
Bleak House
, because Esther was so pretty and sweet to everybody, yet characterful, too. She felt a wonderful creepy thrill when Esther met the grizzled old rag collector, Mr Krook; and an even ghastlier thrill when Mr Krook died by spontaneous combustion, leaving ‘a suffocating vapour in the room, and a dark greasy coating on the walls and ceiling’ and something that looked like ‘the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes.’
    She thought the idea of spontaneous combustion was both fascinating and appalling, and she looked it up in her father’s encyclopedias. There was the Countess Bandi of Casena, in June 1731, of whom only a head, three fingers and both legs were found in a heap of ashes. Then there was the Indian woman who was consumed by flames and whose smoking body was carried between two constables to the District Magistrate near Dinapore.
    As soon as she had finished her homework, Elizabeth would open her fat royal-blue notebook, the one inscribed Strictly And Completely Private, and write another short story aboutlove and horses. Her heroines were always confident, clear-eyed girls whose lives were fulfilled except for one thing: their mothers had mysteriously disappeared when they were little. These confident, clear-eyed girls were invariably mad on showjumping, and their long-lost mothers invariably turned out to be world-class showjumpers who had been permanently crippled in tragic riding accidents at the pinnacle of their careers. Unable to face the world, they had closeted themselves away in ‘gloomy,