Allie's Moon Read Free Page B

gazed through the bedroom window at the cold while moon
that showed its face from between silver-edged clouds.
    Crazy
    She’d heard it before.
    Insane
    Not right in the head.
    They were nasty little words and phrases that
sat like spiders in the corner of people’s minds. It had started
with her mother, long before that dark day all those years ago. And
of course there had been speculation about Olivia since then. Why
should she, Althea, hope to be excluded?
    What was that old saying?
    The fruit doesn’t fall far from the
tree . . . 
    She rolled over and tried to force the
thoughts from her mind. Maybe that was often true, but not about
her. She was positive about that.
    And it wasn’t true about Olivia. Her sister
was just—childlike. Frail and childlike. Why couldn’t people
understand that?
    ~~*~*~*~~
    Jefferson Hicks made his way down a
rain-slick hillside and approached the split rail fence surrounding
the barnyard. Although the sky had finally cleared, it was cold and
damp. He hunched his shoulders against the night chill, wondering
briefly where he’d left his coat. He thought he still owned one,
but then again, he couldn’t be sure.
    Jeff Hicks was never sure of anything
anymore.
    He proceeded as carefully as a man could who
had just emerged from a two-day drunk. The world wasn’t quite
steady yet, and the darkness didn’t help.
    When he touched the latch on the henhouse
door, he stood there for a moment, gripping it to get his bearings.
The wood beneath his fingers was weathered and rough, and his hand
trembled, although not from nervousness. He’d done this a dozen
times or more over the past two years. He wasn’t proud of the fact,
but he’d gotten to be fairly good at it. At least he’d never been
caught.
    Glancing over his shoulder, he looked at the
farmhouse windows again. His hand tightened on the latch.
    The stink of the chicken coop nearly stifled
him, and he wasn’t even inside yet. What was it about those damned
birds, anyway? he wondered as he lifted the bar from its notch.
Even the cleanest henhouse smelled like a full chamber pot under an
August sun. As he inched open the door, the warm, fetid odor poured
out and flowed over him. His empty stomach lurched and his aching
head throbbed harder. He turned his face away, waiting for his
insides to settle down. Then he took a deep breath of clean, cool
air and opened the door wide. After he stepped inside, the light
breeze pushed it closed behind him.
    It was as dark as the east side of midnight
in there. Working from memory—and he knew that wasn’t very
reliable—he reached out and let his hand trail through straw and
God knew what else, feeling for a nest box. An angry squawk and a
hard, sharp peck on the back of his wrist told him he’d found what
he was looking for.
    He plunged his fingers under the chicken and
she let out a series of outraged clucks while he rooted through
feathers and straw in search of his prize.
    “ Shut up, you old bitch,” he whispered
irritably. “You’re sitting on my breakfast. And quit pecking!”
Finally his hand closed around a solitary warm, wet egg. He
withdrew it and put it inside his shirt. After thinking about it
for a moment, he stuck two fingers into his tight front pants
pocket, pulled out a penny, his last, and shoved it under the
chicken. The biddy set up a caterwauling that was loud enough to
wake both the living and the dead.
    As if someone had rung a fire bell, a dog in
the yard began yapping along with the chickens. Farley always kept
his dog in the house at night. What was it doing outside? The
animal apparently rushed to the henhouse because Jeff could hear
the heavy, deep-chested woofs just outside, moving around the
perimeter. The rest of the hens added their panicky cackling to the
racket and flapped blindly around him. He backed up through the
coop with his hand outstretched behind him, groping for the
door.
    Oh, hell, that dog was probably standing on
its hind legs with its front