Skeleton Key Read Free Page B

the living room into the hall. She paused at the bottom of the stairs to see if she could hear Bennis getting up to move around, but it didn’t happen. She went up the stairs slowly, making sure to let them creak. This house was over two hundred years old at its core, and over a hundred at least in both its extensions. It was the oldest and most historically important house in all of Litchfield County. Margaret had picked it out when she was pregnant with Kayla, at a time when Robert was disposed to give her anything she asked for. Later, he made no secret of the fact that he hated the place without reservation. The rooms were small. The floors creaked. The walls bulged in odd places, evenafter thousands of dollars had been spent to make them straight.
    Actually, Margaret thought, as she came to the top of the stairs and paused again—there were still no sounds coming from the living room—there was still no indication that Bennis Hannaford had gotten off her chair and started to snoop. Actually, the real problem was that Robert had hated her without reservation, as she had come to hate him. They had had year after year of each other, and year after year of angry sex, and the point of it all had never been anything but Kayla. If it hadn’t been for Kayla, they would have been divorced and gotten it over with. If it hadn’t been for Kayla, they would have seen nothing of each other at all.
    Margaret had a very distinct memory of sitting up in bed next to Robert sleeping, right here in the master bedroom of this house. She sat there and stared down at his neck, wondering what it would be like to get her hands around the bones there. She imagined the bones breaking, fragile and small, like bird bones in a stone vise. Then she blinked, and the face on the body beside her changed. It was Kayla’s face, wide awake, laughing at her so hard that tears streamed out of the corners of her eyes. Then the face changed to Robert’s again, the features thickened with age and wrong experience. Margaret got up and went into the master bathroom and closed the door.
    Now she went into the bedroom and closed
that
door. Bennis Hannaford wasn’t moving around down there, poking into all the private things. She wasn’t even taking out a cigarette and lighting up, although Margaret had it on good authority that Bennis smoked, like some half-witted factory worker with no self-discipline at all. There were times when you went right to the edge of the universe and looked over the side. You found out that there was nothing there but darkness and fear, so deep and so wide and so pure that you couldn’t even move in it.
    Down in the living room, Bennis Hannaford coughed, long and hard and chokingly.
    Margaret locked the bedroom door and went to sit down on her bed—and that was when it struck her, for the first time, that she should not have let Bennis Hannaford come here.
3
    Annabel Crawford had bought a lot of fake IDs in her life, but this one—with its State of Ohio logo and bright-colored picture—was the best one yet. It was so good that the bartender of the Lucky Eight barely looked at it before setting her up with a St. Pauli Girl Light, and that in spite of the fact that Annabel knew she looked nowhere near twentyone. She barely looked eighteen. It was a kind of curse that had happened to her and to no one else in her family. She was very short and very fine-boned and very small. She was also very flat-chested. All of the slightness taken together made her look like a child, and year after year, in one boarding school after another, Annabel’s teachers had called her out and rechecked her records just to make sure she was old enough to be there. It was Annabel Crawford’s boast that she had been expelled from more boarding schools than anybody else in the history of American private education, and she may have been right.
    At the moment, all she was being right about was the beer, and the