Greenmantle Read Free Page B

when the parents were out…Who needed that stuff? Whack. Maybe she couldn’t yet put into words what it was she did find important, but at least she knew what wasn’t.
    Out here she could do what she wanted. Go for walks. Read. Find out who she wanted to be without the pressure of other kids, or the pressure of her mother desperately hoping that her daughter was fitting in, that all the moving around from neighborhood to neighborhood wasn’t messing up her underdeveloped psyche.
    Ali grinned and whacked another weed. Underdeveloped. That was something else the other kids liked to rag her about. The fact that she was still skinny as a beanpole, not filling out like the rest of them. Whack. Who needed that? She’d seen what a good figure had done for her mother.
    She lifted her stick to hit a tall weed—that was one thing she was going to have to do right off: learn the names of all the plants and trees and stuff around her—when she paused, stick frozen high in the air. Looking at her from the side of the road was a rabbit.
    Ali didn’t dare breathe. It watched her with liquid brown eyes, nose twitching. Jeez, it was cute. She lowered the stick slowly, not wanting to appear threatening, but as soon as she moved, the rabbit turned and bounded off into the woods. Wow. There were probably all kinds of animals right in their backyard. Rabbits and raccoons, deer, maybe even foxes.
    She had a couple of Tom Brown Jr. wilderness guides back in her room and she could hardly wait to get them out of whatever box they were in and put them to some use. This was going to be a great summer.
    Whack, whack. She hit a couple more weeds and started to hum as she followed the road again, wondering where it led. It took her around a bend and she could see buildings about three-quarters of a mile farther on. The road seemed to go on into the woods beyond them and she decided to go that far and maybe have a peek at the buildings. She wouldn’t go too close—she didn’t want to end off her first day by having some cranky old farmer getting pissed off at her because she was trespassing—but she did want to see what the place was like. Please don’t let them have any kids.
    The road just sort of piddled out as it got to the forest. It looked as though it had continued once, but now it was overgrown and only a footpath went on through the trees. It’d be fun to see where it went to, she thought as she turned her attention to the buildings.
    The set-up was much like what she and her mom had: a renovated farmhouse with an old gray-timbered relic of a barn towering up behind it and a few outbuildings. But unlike their own place, here the grounds were neatly tended with a hedge running alongside the road, some apple trees up by the barn and flowerbeds in front of the house, filled with multi-colored blossoms. The forest closed in around the landscaped lot on three sides, dense and darkly mysterious to Ali’s city-wise eyes. The smell of cut grass hung in the air. She moved a little closer, her stick scraping in the dirt by her sneakers.
    “What can I do for you, kid?”
    The voice startled her, lifting goosebumps on her skin. She turned to see a man standing up on the other side of the short hedge, and she wondered where he’d popped up from. She hadn’t seen him as she’d walked up. He was dressed in jeans, with a red bandana around his head like a sweatband. His hair was thick and black, and his muscular body was darkly tanned except for a number of white puckers and lines that stood out against the dark skin. His eyes were pale blue and reminded her of Paul Newman’s. She’d just seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for the umpteenth time on the late show last week. As he moved closer toward her, favoring his right leg, she realized the marks on his body were scars. Lots of them.
    “I said, what can I do for you?”
    “Uh…nothing,” Ali stammered. “I’m just, uh, walking—you know?”
    “This is private property,” he