The House on Persimmon Road Read Free Page B

through the door was a slender, elegantly clad woman with silver hair shaped into a perfectly rendered chignon. Lottie surmised the woman was about her own age. Well, not her age now, but before.
    A blonde-haired girl hesitated on the threshold until she was given a push by an elderly woman with a cane. Lottie gasped.
    The old lady was dressed in various shades of purple and mauve and had tightly permed curls. Purple permed curls.
    Lottie had never seen hair like it. Trailing cobwebs she moved down from the ceiling and whirled about the old woman for a better look. She wanted to touch the hair, but didn’t dare. The woman hobbled into the parlor and sat in a fiddle-back chair.
    Lottie plopped down on the matching stool and stared. She spared a glance for a younger woman who came in and began inspecting the room, but it was the purple hair that kept her enthralled.
    “I swear! It’s cold in here,” complained Agnes. “And look.” She shuddered, pointing at Lottie. “Dust and spider webs are literally falling from the ceiling!”
    “You don’t exercise enough, Mother Hale,” suggested Justine. Stepping into the wide hall was like stepping into a dusty, cool fortress. “I think it’s quite pleasant. And the agent was right about spaciousness—this house is huge.”
    Agnes snorted. “I guess I know cold when I feel cold. Pip, dear,” she said, as he came racing into the room, “open those French doors, and let in some of that nice warm breeze.”
    “Mom,” he said breathlessly. “There’s no bathroom.”
    “Of course there’s a bathroom.”
    It’s on a corner of the back porch, said Lottie, trying to be helpful. It’s a good bathroom. The same tenant who owned the Oakland installed it.
    No one paid Lottie any mind. That was another problem with being in the state she was in, she thought with a twinge of disgust. No one could hear her. The only way she had of getting a body’s attention was to mingle with the other’s aura and sort of make suggestions. Sometimes that worked and sometimes not.
    “I looked in every room, Mom. Ask Judy Ann, if you don’t believe me.”
    “There’re all sorts of nooks and crannies in the house, darling, you just missed it, is all.”
    “He didn’t,” announced Pauline, arriving on Pip’s heels. “I couldn’t find it myself. I’m in a terrible fix, too.”
    “Are you?” Agnes smiled wickedly, voice full of sly hope. “Diarrhea?”
    Pauline scowled at Agnes.
    Justin threw up her hands. “Please, you two, save your energy for unpacking. The movers are bringing in the beds. Mother, can you hold on? I’ll locate the pot in a minute.”
    “No, I can’t hold on. I begged you to stop at that last gas station, remember? But no—”
    Justine sighed. “All right. It’s your bedstead they’re bringing in, Mother Hale. Tell them which room.”
    Agnes beamed and moved with alacrity, cane bouncing. Pauline protested. “She’ll pick the finest room for herself!”
    “Which is it to be, Mother, mover guidance or an accident in your pants?”
    “The bathroom. But I must say, you’ve become exceedingly vulgar.”
    “I don’t know how else to protect myself.”
    “From what?”
    “If you have to ask…” warned Justine, patience growing thin as a taut wire.
    “If only your father were alive,” began Pauline, but the fierce gleam in her daughter’s eyes caused her to stop in midsentence.
    Lottie had taken in the whole of the conversation, observing Pauline’s air of disdain and Agnes’s peevishness. The outcome settled it in her mind that the one called Justine suffered a peck of trouble at the hands of the two old biddies.
    Since the house was Lottie’s own, she thought it did behoove her to rise to hostess duties. She left her perch on the stool and hovered near Justine.
    With Pauline following, Justine went off down the wide hall. She couldn’t say how she knew the bathroom was on the back porch. She just seemed to know. She put it down to an obscure,