Scare the Light Away Read Free Page A

forever and dinner finally ended.
    To make way for the worst torment of them all.
    We traveled together in the SUV. It being the largest, by far, and Dad eager as a schoolboy to show it off. He was a strange man, my father. As a child and then a teenager I never knew whether he really didn’t understand the hurricanes of emotion that were constantly rolling through his family or whether he simply didn’t care. Here he was leading us all out the door, chattering on about the speed and horsepower of my rental. What Dad doesn’t know, he makes up.
    Watson’s had undergone quite a transformation since I’d seen it last. Perfect rows of carefully pruned tea roses were stirring themselves back to life, and crisply pruned hedges lined the neat brick path. Not only Watson’s, but the entire downtown of North Ridge, the larger town to the north of our own Hope River, was light-years from the town I left so long ago. Someone, or something, had brought money into this once almost abandoned Near-North Ontario town.
    A smiling woman in a severe gray, pinstriped suit, long dark hair pulled back into a skin-stretching bun, stood at the door to greet us. “This way, please,” she said, her young voice forced into deep and somber tones. “I am so sorry for your loss.”
    I followed my family into Watson’s Funeral Home.

Chapter 4
    Diary of Miss Janet Green. January 14, 1944
    Mrs. Robert McKenzie. Mrs. Robert McKenzie. That sounds so perfectly wonderful. Last night we went to a dance in town with Bob’s best mate Charlie and Charlie’s date Louise, who is Mrs. Bridges’ niece, come up from London to stay with her grandparents for the duration of the war. It’s safer, they say, out here in the countryside. Charlie and Bob were walking us to the bus when Bob took my arm and we dropped back a bit.Then he asked me if I would marry him. I said “Yes” so loudly, I was sure that the whole of Surrey would hear me. I am to be married! Mrs. Robert McKenzie. I can’t wait to tell Dad and Aunt Betty. She has gone to London for a fortnight’s visit to her and Dad’s sister Joan, who got word that her second son, Raymond, has been killed in Italy. And that after losing her Arthur, named in honor of my own dad, in North Africa last year. Two of my cousins, gone. I remember when we traveled on the train to London that Christmas before Mum left. They were horrid boys, Raymond and Arthur. I cried and told Mum and Dad I wanted to go home. Mum hit me and told me I was a foolish girl and I would never get a husband if I didn’t learn how to be nice to boys. Things have changed so quickly. Is it the war, I wonder? Or do things always change? Must be the war. Dad has lived in this village for his whole life, and his parents before him. Aunt Betty escaped for a while. She went up to London. I was only little then, but I remember Granny saying she would never speak to Betty again. And she never did. Granny died the next winter—as if the devil was getting back at her for making such an evil promise. But Aunt Betty came back, and now she keeps house for my dad and me.
    What was I saying? Oh yes. I’m not that plain little girl any more. I’m seventeen years old and engaged to be married and Raymond and Arthur are dead. I wish I could tell Mum, tell her I am going to be married.
    I told Bob that I don’t want to tell Dad before Aunt Betty. So we will wait until next Tuesday, when she comes home. They will be so happy for me! In the meanwhile Bob will start whatever it is that he has to do to get us married. It is such a dreadfully complicated process. I would love to just skip down to the rectory one sunny Sunday and ask the Vicar to marry us. But Bob has to fill out all sorts of papers, and talk to his commanding officer, who I hear is a perfectly horrid brute. Bob said he might even want to meet me before he gives us permission. I hope not! I would be simply terrified!
    I want to get married today!

Chapter 5
    “Reverend Wyatt’s come home a