Three Days to Never Read Free Page B

wooden sign, with hand-carved letters: Everyone Who Dwells Here Is Safe. Daphne had wondered about it ever since she had been able to read, and only last summer she had found the sentence in a Grimm Brothers fairy tale, “The Maiden Without Hands.” The sentence had been on a sign in front of the house of a good fairy who had taken in a fugitive queen and her baby son.
    The air was cooler under the trellis, and Daphne could smell roses on the breeze. She wondered how her father was taking the news of his grandmother’s death. He and his sister had been toddlers when they lost their parents—their father ran away and their mother died in a car crash soon after—and they had been raised here, by Grammar.
    Her father stopped on the step up to the back door, and Daphne saw that one of the vertical windows beside the door was broken; and when her father walked to the doorand twisted the knob, the door swung inward. None of the locks here are any good, she thought.
    â€œYou’ve erased fingerprints!” panted Bennett, who was right behind Daphne now. “It was probably a burglar that broke the window.”
    â€œA burglar would have reached through and turned the knob inside,” Daphne told him. “My dad isn’t going to touch that one.”
    â€œDaph,” said her father. “Wait out here with Bennett.”
    Her father stepped into the kitchen, and her uncle at least waited with her.
    â€œProbably broke it herself,” muttered Bennett. “Marritys.”
    â€â€˜Divil a man can say a word agin them,’” said Daphne. She and her father had recently watched Yankee Doodle Dandy, and her head was full of George M. Cohan lyrics.
    Bennett glanced away from the door to give her an irritable look. “All that Shakespeare won’t help you get a job. Except—” He shook his head and resumed staring at the kitchen door.
    â€œIt’ll help me get a job as a literature professor,” she said blandly, knowing that that was what his except had referred to. Her father was a literature professor at the University of Redlands. “Best job there is.” Her uncle Bennett was a location manager for TV commercials, and apparently made way more money than her father did.
    Her uncle opened his mouth and then after a second snapped it shut again, clearly not wanting to get into an argument with a girl. “You absolutely reek of gasoline,” he said instead.
    She heard footsteps on linoleum in the house, and then her father pulled the kitchen door wide open. “If there was a thief, he’s gone,” he said. “Let’s see if she has any beers in her ’frigerator.”
    â€œWe shouldn’t touch anything,” said Bennett, but he stepped in ahead of Daphne. The house was cool, and the kitchen smelled faintly of bacon and onions and cigarettes, as usual.
    Daphne couldn’t see that anything in the room was different from the way it had looked at Easter—the spotless sink and counter, the garlic-and-dried-rosemary centerpiece on the kitchen table; the broom was upside down in the corner, but the old lady always kept it that way—to scare off nightmares, according to her father.
    Bennett picked up a business card from the kitchen counter. “See?” he said. “Bell Cabs. She must have taken a taxi to the airport.” He set it back down again.
    Her father had lifted the receiver from the yellow telephone on the wall and was using the forefinger of the same hand to spin the dial. With his other hand he pointed at the refrigerator. “Daph, could you see if there’s a beer in there?”
    Daphne pulled open the door of the big green refrigerator—it was older than her father, who had once said that it looked like a 1950 Buick stood on its nose—and found two cans of Budweiser among the jars of nasty black concoctions.
    She put one into her father’s hand and waved the other at her