Friends till the End Read Free Page B

challenge?”
    “Snooky’s always been good at crossword puzzles. Don’t take it personally, Bernard.”
    Bernard subsided into an unhappy silence. Snooky raised a warning eyebrow at his sister.
    Maya was five years older, but other than that they looked very much alike. Both were lanky, with pale faces, thin crooked noses and straight golden-brown hair which Maya wore in a pageboy and Snooky wore carelessly brushed back. They were fine-boned and aristocratic-looking, like greyhounds.
    “Be careful, darling sister. You’re going to sour my visit here.”
    He had shown up at their door with little or no advance warning only a week before. His full name was Arthur B. Randolph, and he had no occupation. Maya looked over at him fondly. He was their elder brother William’s greatest failure; William, who was ten years older than Maya and had single-handedly raised the two of them after their parents died. William, the lawyer, who had tried to instill the work ethic into each of his younger siblings and had succeeded only with Maya, who had a job writing a weekly column for a magazine called
The Animal World.
She wrote on subjects varying from the denizens of the Amazon to the possibility of life in outer space. Snooky referred to it as “the jungle beetle column”; he was vaguely scornful of her career, but then, of course, Snooky had never worked a day in his life. William had nearly broken down on that momentous day, four years ago, when Snooky had reached the age of twenty-one and William had been forced to give him his share of their parents’ wealth.
    “Wastrel,” William had told Maya, tears streaming down his face. She had never seen him so upset. “Wastrel! He’ll go straight through it. You’ll see, Maya. He’ll squander it all.”
    But Snooky had not squandered it. For the past four years he had roamed the country, settling first here, then there, flitting from place to place like a large good-natured dragonfly. One of his favorite places to visit was his sister’s sprawling Victorian house in Ridgewood, Connecticut. Ridgewood was a lovely little town that had retained some of its original New England charm; it had a quiet Main Street lined with shops and was surrounded by lakes and wooded hills. It was just over two hours away from New York City and featured what Bernard prized most in life: seclusion.
    “Sometimes I think,” Maya had remarked to Snooky once, “if Bernard could be a hermit and still be married, he would be.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Maya. Bernard
is
a married hermit.”
    Bernard and Maya had purchased the house four years earlier, when they got married. They had fallen in lovewith it at first sight, much as they had with each other (both were firm believers in intuition), and had bought it over the objections of their friend and real estate agent, a short surly individual named Seymour. Seymour had pointed out the many disadvantages: the plumbing, in a sad state of disrepair; the huge heating bills; the window on the third floor in the back bedroom which would have to be fixed; the cold drafts through the ridiculous number of fireplaces (five). What Maya and Bernard had seen was a beautiful old house on a winding lane, with an expanse of green lawn, a patch of woods, and the nearest house, a geodesic dome made primarily of glass, far enough away for privacy.
    “I won’t let you buy it,” Seymour had announced in a menacing manner. “It’ll fall down. You’ll live to regret it. Trust me. It’s my business.”
    “We’re buying it,” Bernard said. Bernard, in general, spoke very little; this was a long sentence for him.
    “You’re not.”
    “We are.”
    “Over my dead body,” said Seymour.

    Bernard shrugged. “Get the gun,” he said to Maya.
    They settled the contract and moved in in record time. It turned out that Seymour had been wrong about nearly everything. The house was a little cold in winter, but the addition of a new and larger furnace