The Glory Hand Read Free

there was no bottle on the table. The thought of her mother going upstairs to her bedroom when she hadn't come home, to drink alone, sickened Cassie. Had the National Enquirer been correct when it had printed its malicious 'scoop' not long ago: Ann Broyles vs the Bottle ? Was that the real reason why her mother had been avoiding the public eye in the last few months? Why she had chosen to come out to Nantucket during spring vacation with Cassie, instead of following her husband on the political circuit that might edge him closer to a shot at the Presidency?
    Cassie thought of adding the cork to the collection her mother kept lined up on the windowsill in the kitchen, mementos of the family dinners they had shared at Cliffs Edge over the years. But as she pushed through the swinging kitchen door, she threw the cork into the waste-basket instead, and slid the platter of chicken into the refrigerator.
    Another scream.
    This time it wasn't the cry of a gull or the screech of the weather vane rusting above the widow's walk. This time the cry Cassie heard wasn't an echo in her mind. It came from inside the house. Upstairs. And what had begun as a single shriek dissolved into a cacophony of voices.
    She rushed over to a Currier and Ives print on the wall near the stove and pulled aside the frame. The tin mouth of the dumbwaiter shaft yawned open behind it, the dumbwaiter that hadn't been used since the rats had gnawed the pulley ropes years before. Cassie tore through a veil of cobwebs and leaned inside.
    The noise that echoed off the tin walls - it sounded like voices on a record played at the wrong speed, racing with an urgency she couldn't understand. When rats scurried up the walls of the dumbwaiter shaft, their squeals might sound like voices, she thought.
    But this wasn't rats. It was a woman's voice that echoed down the shaft. Her mother's voice.
    Why did that startle her so? Her mother was the only person in the house, wasn't she? But she never raised her voice. Not at Cassie. Not at her husband - even when his Irish temper exploded. Ann Broyles kept her anger locked inside her, expressing it only in the brooding paintings at her easel on the second-floor landing. No, Cassie thought, her mother never shrieked like that.
    And the words . . . Cassie could hear a few that bled through: '. . . Bitch. . . you fucking bitch . . .'It was her mother's voice, but her mother never talked like that.
    Someone's up there . . .
    Impulsively, Cassie grabbed a carving knife from the counter and pushed open the kitchen door into the hall. A garbled torrent of curses rang down the stairwell. She rushed up the stairs, the planking, warped from generations of footsteps, complaining underfoot. On the second-floor landing a grandfather clock chimed once, her startled face reflected in the swinging pendulum. She clutched the knife more tightly, raising it high, ready to . . . attack? She had no idea who ... or what. . . was the enemy.
    When she reached the third-floor landing the shrill, onesided argument ended. The house was filled with a leaden silence, pierced only by the tick of the grandfather clock. She had expected to see a sliver of light beneath her mother's door, as thin as the knife blade in her hand. Instead, darkness.
    Someone's in there with her. He heard you coming. He's waiting.
    She hesitated to touch the old brass knob shaped like a lion's paw, as if it were charged with a powerful electric shock. Outside the leaded window at the end of the hall a foghorn moaned, and a light on a ship's mast bobbed across the horizon, like the North Star veering off-course.
    She grabbed the knob and turned it. The corroded latch resisted stubbornly. She threw all her weight against the door. Grudgingly it creaked open.
    Gauze curtains flailed in the breeze from the open window, catching the moonlight, and it looked for a moment as though the glowing scorpaena from the sea had filtered inside the bedroom. Reflections from the waves cast green