A Family Affair: A Novel of Horror Read Free

begun to think of herself as a spinster. She was pretty, in a frail sort of way, but she did not know it, because no one had ever told her. She had no suitors, nor friends of any kind—no one to whom she could turn now for consolation or companionship.
    She knew that people regarded her as peculiar. Always, she had been kept at a distance from other people. As a little girl she had not been permitted to have friends. They had lived, she and her mother, very nearly as hermits, and by the time her first year at school had ended, Jennifer already knew that the other children thought her “funny,” and made up little rhymes about her: “Jenny, Jenny, eat a daisy, Jenny, Jenny, you are crazy.” It had made her withdraw, and cooperate in her mother’s efforts to isolate them.
    For twenty-six years her life had centered around her mother, that strong, demanding creature whose demands had finally ceased so abruptly. For years Jennifer had been not so much a daughter as a combination of companion and house servant, and later, of course, nurse. Her time and her energies had belonged not to herself but to Elenora Rand exclusively. Every mood, every notion, every whim had been at the request of, or merely a reflection of, the older woman. She had resented her role, and yet she had hidden her resentment and played it without complaint, because she had been trained to do just that.
    She reached home, the simple white cottage she had lived in for as long as she could remember. It was neat and clean and thoroughly respectable. The shutters were closed over the windows, as they always had been.
    Once again the sensation of aloneness came over her and Jennifer stopped, half frightened of entering the house. It held no welcome for her. It was where she had lived, it was now all she had or was in life; but it was not home to her uneasy spirit.
    There was no place else for her to go. She climbed the three steps that led to the front door and entered the hall, with a quick furtive manner as if afraid someone might try to follow.
    It was not until she had dutifully put her coat away in the closet and had gone into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea that she remembered the letter. It had come the day before and, puzzled by it, she had put it aside to read it later when the bother and distraction of the funeral was over.
    She went to her bedroom—not to her mother’s room, where she had been sleeping on the little bed, but to her own bedroom, that she had returned to. The letter was in the drawer of her dresser, next to a strand of cultured pearls. She had ordered the pearls from a mail order catalog, and her mother had been angry when they came; but she had relented, and allowed Jennifer to keep them, “for special occasions.” They had never been worn. Jennifer had considered wearing them to the funeral, but had not been able to decide on her own whether that was the right sort of special occasion, and in the end she had gone without them.
    Jennifer took the letter back to the kitchen, but she did not read it until her tea was ready and she was seated at the small kitchen table. Then she opened it carefully and unfolded the single sheet of paper.
    It was the opening line that most puzzled her: “Your mother asked us to write and....”
    It was from someone who signed her name Aunt Christine. Strange, although Jennifer had searched her mother’s personal papers more than once since the death, carefully examining every item in the small desk, she had found no trace of any relatives. And now here was this letter, signed Aunt Christine, and saying, “Your mother asked us to write and invite you to visit with us at Kelsey House.”
    Of course her mother had known for a year or more that she was dying; no doctor would have dared to conceal the fact from her. It was entirely possible that, in a flash of foresight, she had written to her sisters, those long neglected relatives, explaining that