Nebulon Horror Read Free Page B

turps, all kinds of dangerous products were improperly stored in a windowless back room. In the record-breaking heat of that August the room must have been a time bomb. No one knew when the fire broke out or even when Ellyn became aware of it and ran from her house next door to try to extinguish it. She didn't phone the fire station as she should have. Foolishly she tried to cope with the emergency herself.
    The hardware store had few close neighbors. Ed Crosser had expected the town to grow out that way, but it hadn't. When at last someone down the road did call the fire station, the store was beyond saving. The firemen could only stand around and watch it become a heap of fiercely smoking rubble that choked them with a reek of bubbling paint and plastics. They didn't know Ellyn Crosser was inside until hours later when it cooled and they went poking amid the debris.
    After this second tragedy little Teresa went to live with Ellyn's older sister, Elizabeth Peckham. In Nebulon, where most girls married soon after finishing high school, Elizabeth was regarded as an old maid. She was thirty-one. In charge of the town library for years, she lived just behind it in an ancient gray house left to her in his will the year before by old Gustave Nebulon. Gustave was the last of the pioneer clan, that had settled the town. He personally had donated the library. Before dying at ninety-three he had spent hours at the library almost every day, and when he left Elizabeth the house he had so long lived in, the town was certain he had been secretly in love with her.
    Perhaps. If so, he was probably the only man who ever had loved her or would. Unlike her sister Ellyn, Elizabeth was a woman without warmth or beauty. Tall, thin, ruler straight, she seemed especially created to scowl and hiss at giggling children in a library. At a time when dresses were brief she wore hers below the knee. In Florida's summer heat when most women in Nebulon wore as little of anything as they decently could, she covered herself as much as possible and without question wore an equal weight of undergarments.
    Unfailingly polite to all, Elizabeth was informally friendly to none. It was assumed that when she closed the library each evening and marched through the high hibiscus hedge to her huge, ancient house, she spent her evenings as she spent her days, with books.
    This of course changed somewhat when little Teresa Crosser came to live with her. It was August. Not knowing how to entertain the youngster or even keep her occupied, Elizabeth called on Olive Jansen. "Teresa tells me your Jerri is her closest friend at school," she said. It was true. The two children had become companions in the first grade, seeking each other out at every opportunity. "Please," Elizabeth said, "do you suppose you could bring your daughter over now and then for an hour or two? My niece is so sad without her mother."
    "Of course," Olive said without hesitation. Actually it would help her, for what to do with Jerri during school vacation was sometimes a problem. Olive worked at the Pink Swan from mid morning to late afternoon, the hours varying with the number of customers. When school was in session there was no great problem. Other tenants in the building had children. The kids trooped off to school together in the morning and returned together about three. Jerri simply played with some of them until Olive came home from work.
    But now in August with no school it became awkward at times. She sometimes left the child with neighbors, repaying them by baby-sitting when they wanted to go out at night. Or she would drop Jerri off at her own parents' home on her way to work. Now and then when all else failed she even left the youngster with Vin at the Wilding Nursery, where Jerri happily trotted around at his heels trying to lend a hand in everything he did. Keith Wilding didn't mind.
    She felt a little strange, calling on Elizabeth the first time. It was a Sunday morning. Most of the other