Duckling Ugly Read Free Page A

said.
    “No, no, what was the word?” Marisol said slowly. “She’s an…
abomination
!”
    That caught me off guard. Had they been there that day—or had they only heard? Or were they the master-means behind it?
    I lunged toward Marisol, wanting to rip that pretty skin off her face, but Marshall held me back and then tossed me against a gravestone so hard it almost toppled over. I felt the impact of that stone in every joint of my body.
    “Don’t you touch Marisol,” he said. “You ain’t got a right to touch her. Or me. Or anybody.”
    I tried to get away, but he pushed me back against the stone again. “Where you going, piggy girl? Don’t you want to spy on ussome more? Maybe I’ll get you a camera. Hey, will it break if you’re the one snapping the picture, too?”
    Then something swung out of nowhere and slammed against Marshall’s ear. He stumbled back.
    Suddenly there, in the half-light of day’s end, was a woman who had to be at least ninety years old, brandishing the blunt end of a pitchfork.
    I knew who it was right away. Most folks just called her “the crazy woman of Vista View” and left it at that, but I knew her name: Miss Leticia Radcliffe. She was the one who lived in the house. The one who didn’t leave when the place became a cemetery.
    “Hey!” yelled Marshall, holding his ear. “What are you, nuts?!”
    “You stay back or I’ll swing it again. And next time I’ll use the business end.”
    And, just to make her point, she swung the blunt end one more time. It didn’t come anywhere near him. In fact, she wasn’t even facing him directly when she swung it, and I wondered why.
    “Marshall, let’s just go,” begged Marisol. “That witch’ll kill you soon as look at you.”
    But Marshall was not the kind of guy to back down from a fight, especially with a feeble old woman. He stepped forward, sticking his chest out.
    “You get outta here,” he said to Miss Leticia. “Go on back to your house. This ain’t none of your business.”
    “This used to be my land,” she said, “so I make everything that happens here my business. You leave this girl alone, and get out the way you came.”
    “And if we don’t?”
    Then Miss Leticia Radcliffe did the most wonderful, wicked, unbelievable thing I’d ever seen. She took that old pitchfork and jammed it right through the tip of Marshall’s left Nike!
    Marshall wailed in pain. “Ahhh, my toe!”
    Then the old woman leaned close to him and whispered, “Next time…it’ll be your heart.”
    She pulled out the pitchfork, and the fight blew out of Marshall like he was a balloon that had been popped. He took off with Marisol, limping and moaning all the way.
    When they were gone, Miss Leticia turned to me—and now I could see why she hadn’t looked right at Marshall when she had swung that pitchfork. Miss Leticia had cataracts as gray as an April storm. She could see enough to tell night from day, I guessed, but not a whole lot more. She must have known Vista View like the back of her hand, and she didn’t need to see much to know what was going on when she got there.
    She looked toward me, but not quite at me. “Now I’m just guessing, mind you—but from what that boy called you, I would say that you’re the DeFido girl.”
    “Cara,” I told her. “So you heard about the nickname.”
    “Oh, believe me, I’ve been called a whole lot worse than that.” She let loose a long, hearty laugh. “‘The Flock’s Rest Monster’ ain’t all that bad, considering. It sounds legendary. Dignified.”
    She planted the pitchfork firmly on a grave and took my hand. “You come on in. I’ll make us some tea.”

3

The Sweet and the Rancid
    A lthough I didn’t actually know her before that day, Miss Leticia had always been of interest to me. Maybe it was because she was an outcast in town, rumored to have killed her husband when he sold this land, which had been in her family for generations. That was long before I was born, but the