The Door in the Forest Read Free Page A

arrived.
    “Hold on there, Danny,” she called through the bathroom door. Actually, through two doors with a hallway between. She had a big voice when it was needed.
    “No hurry,” he called back. He didn’t mind having a few minutes to look around. He loved the old place, and the old lady who enlivened it, and he didn’t see why everybody thought she was so strange. Odd, yes. For one thing, she’d kept her own name, although she’d been married. All the Byrdsong women did, apparently. Once a Byrdsong, always a Byrdsong. Daniel remembered Mrs. Fish shaking her head about it. But what was so awful about keeping your own name? These were modern times.
    He went into the sitting room, where there was a painting he especially liked. It showed a clearing with wind-bent grasses tipped with sunlight. In the middle stood a swaying oak tree, and beneath it a blanket, a picnic basket, and a bottle of wine. The only thing missing was people. The painting was titled simply
Here
.
    Daniel was also taken with a mirror by the front door that showed not your face, but the back of your head. It was to help you fix your hair, or adjust your hat, Bridey had onceexplained, before you went out. Daniel stood before it now, examining a blond cowlick that his comb had never managed to tame.
    At the same moment, Mrs. Byrdsong was examining a dwindling peninsula of suds in the cooling tub. There was something she didn’t understand, and it bothered her. She cast her eye over the bubbles and the pattern of their bursting. The message was clear, but the meaning obscure. She was supposed to pass the necklace on. And not to the person she thought. Curious.
    With a sigh, she reached for the towel and hoisted herself up. She’d seen what there was to see.
    “You’ll find a plate of cookies on the counter,” she yelled out. “Fresh this morning.”
    “I see them. Thanks.”
    “Leave a few for the rest of us.”
    Ten minutes later, she emerged, heavily scented and bangled, like a ship from the East under full sail. Two of her numerous cats trotted ahead of her.
    “My,” she said, “you’re getting to be a tall drink of water.”
    That was what she always said, and Daniel, who was self-conscious about his height, never knew what to answer. He was supposed to come up with something, he knew. “You’re all dressed up,” he said, finally.
    “We’re having a visitor. I don’t want to make a bad impression.”
    “How’d you know? Do you know who she is?”
    “She?” Bridey tried the word on in her mind. “No. The suds only tell me so much.”
    “The man said she’s your granddaughter.”
    “Ah.” She broke a cookie and slowly ate the bigger half. “Emily,” she said.
    “That’s it. We have her over at the house.”
    She put her hand briefly over her mouth, to hold in the crumbs. “And Miranda?”
    “Who?”
    “Emily’s mother.”
    “They said she was arrested.”
    “Arrested!” A crumb caught in her throat and sent her into a spasm of coughing that ended only when Daniel pounded her on the back.
    She nodded and waved him away, her eyes watering.
    Miranda—arrested? The suds had said nothing about that. She sipped from the glass of water Daniel brought her. Miranda might have changed in the six years since she’d moved away, but she had not been, growing up, the sort who would last long in a government prison. Not
this
government.
    “Danny,” she said, her voice a little wobbly, “would you help me upstairs? There’s something I need.”
    “Tell me where it is. I’ll get it.” He remembered the last time he’d helped her get up the stairs, only to have her forget what she’d come for.
    “It needs me to find it,” she said, reaching for her cane.
    The help that Daniel gave was to walk behind her as she toiled through semidarkness up a narrowing staircase that every eight steps made a left-angled turn. Then it was every six steps, then every four, the house sharpening to a turret. Daniel’s function, he