Free Autumn Blue by Karen Harter Page A

hand. He leaned to the left, his
     knees braced against the ladder. Stretching his right arm across his body, he pushed upward with both hands, his head tipped
     back awkwardly. At first the aluminum spout refused to match up with the mouth of the gutter. He grunted and adjusted his
     aim, blood draining from his head. There. Got it! He held it firmly with his left hand, fumbling for his hammer with the right,
     wishing for a third hand to pull a nail from his clamped lips.
    A shrill scream sliced the air. Millard jerked backward as if stabbed in the chest. The downspout fell from his grip, clattering
     against the side of the house. He grabbed for the ladder, fighting an immediate case of vertigo.
    The bedroom window slid open. “Oh, Mr. Bradbury! It’s you. What are you doing? You nearly scared me to death!”
    Sidney Walker had no idea who was nearly scared to death. His fingers clenched the ladder as if rigor mortis had already set
     in. Millard forced one hand loose and held his palpitating chest. “I didn’t mean to . . . I mean I wasn’t . . . your downspout.
     I was fixing your downspout.”
    “Oh.” She cocked her head. “Well, God bless you. I’ve been wanting to fix that, but I didn’t have a ladder. Just a minute.”
     The window slammed shut, and seconds later she came out the front door and down the steps. “Let me help you with that.”
    There were some advantages to being old, he guessed. If he were a younger man hovering outside her daughters’ window, Sidney
     would surely have called the sheriff. The sirens would be howling their way up Boulder Road from town right now. She helped
     him push the downspout onto the funnel of the gutter and held it in place while he nailed the strap to the siding.
    “I thought you would be at work,” he said. “Didn’t notice your car there until I was already up on the ladder.” He backed
     down the rungs and lowered the ladder to the ground.
    “Well,” she said with a sigh, “something came up today. I had to make a bunch of phone calls. Would you like to come in for
     some iced tea, Mr. Bradbury?”
    He should be tending to his mole problem. He had a new plan of attack and was sure it would get better results than the Juicy
     Fruit gum. He glanced over his shoulder toward his neat, white ranch-style house. Rita’s car was still in the drive. She didn’t
     normally stay this long. What was she waiting for? To give him a good scolding, that’s what. “I think I’d like some tea,”
     he said.
    Millard followed Sidney into her house. The place looked surprisingly cheery and a lot cleaner than one would suspect, judging
     by the outside. Quite tidy, really, with matching curtains tied back with fancy rope braids, an elegant cloth on the dining
     room table, and a huge bouquet of dahlias and daisies (which she certainly didn’t cut from her own yard). A painted coffee
     table held stacks of neatly folded clothes. He wandered to a wall of framed photos while Sidney commented from the kitchen
     on the nice Indian summer they were having and how she hoped it would last. The pictures were of her children from newborn
     to missing teeth to the awkward school photos where their front teeth looked too big for their faces. There was a mustached
     man in the family shots up until the boy looked to be maybe six or seven and the girls were still babies. Sidney cradled an
     infant or toddler in each of the poses, her thick, dark blond hair and big eyes almost too intense for her slight frame. The
     next portrait in line showed the father conspicuously missing, a blank spot where he belonged, almost as if they were expecting
     him to show up any second and breathlessly take his spot next to their mother, his hand resting as it had before on the shoulder
     of the dark-haired boy. A normal-looking boy he was—actually quite handsome, with wide brown eyes and long, dark lashes.
    “That’s Tyson,” she said, noting the photo that held his gaze. She passed Millard a