LITMIR.BIZ

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There was one place set for breakfast at the table in the dining room. A fortress of little boxes of dry cereal ringed the place mat, and there was a glass of pale juice that turned out not to be orange, but grapefruit. It puckered her mouth. Norah took the glass with her to the window and looked out.

      She was surprised to discover her great-aunt in the backyard, her clothing covered by an enormous black raincoat. Moving carefully over the frozen ground, Caroline Stoppard was making the rounds of the ice-coated birdfeeders. Norah watched as she threaded her way between the feeding stations, filling each one with a scoop cut from a plastic bleach bottle that she dipped into a garbage can of seed on the back step.

      And there, watching her, was the boy. Norah was positive it was the same person she’d seen last evening. This time, he was standing inside the hedge, holding the collar of his short jacket closed with one hand, his shoulders hunched against the bitter rain. Aunt Caroline seemed unaware of him.

      Norah felt her pulse quicken in her throat, and she rapped on the window to alert her aunt to his presence. “Over there,” she mouthed, pointing, when the woman looked up with a scowl. “That boy, there!”

      Aunt Caroline didn’t seem to understand. She shook her head and bent to dip the scoop into the pail of birdseed again.

      Quickly, Norah set the juice onto the table and strode toward the kitchen. She’d go to the back door where her aunt could hear her. But out of the corner of her eye she saw that the boy had already vanished, slipping away into the trees beyond the hedge.

      She met Aunt Caroline coming up the back steps and held the door open for her. “Didn’t you see . . . ? Oh, be careful on those stairs!” Norah cried, realizing the coat of ice on the stone.

      Aunt Caroline entered the house with a great flapping of the raincoat and stepped out of her rubber boots. “I’m always careful,” she snapped. “But my feathered friends will be looking to be fed as soon as this storm’s over.” She glared at Norah. “Have you had your breakfast yet?”

      “I was just about to,” Norah admitted, as her great-aunt hung the dripping raincoat behind the door. “I didn’t think you’d seen that boy out there, so I was trying to warn you.”

      “Is that what you were hammering on the window about?”

      “I wasn’t hammering,” Norah objected. “I just wanted to get your attention.”

      “Well, nonetheless, I don’t need any broken windows, thank you. And I can assure you I was quite alone out there.” Still in her stockinged feet, Aunt Caroline filled a kettle at the sink and set it over an opening in the stove.

      “There was a boy out there, Aunt Caroline,” Norah insisted. “And it wasn’t the first time I’ve seen him either. He was there last night too. It’s like he’s watching the house.”

      “Nonsense,” her great-aunt scoffed. She sat down in the rocking chair to tie her shoes, then straightened up, slapping her hands against her thighs. “There, now I am ready for my mid-morning cup of tea. When you’ve finished breakfast, please bring your dishes in to the sink.”

      Confused and a little angry besides, Norah returned to the dining room. As she had expected, the yard was now deserted. But she had seen someone there! What seemed more puzzling even than the appearance of the stranger, was that her aunt refused to believe her. Why would she think she’d make it up? Could it be that the old lady did not want to be reminded about how vulnerable she was, living out here on her own?

      When she took her dishes to the kitchen, Norah found Aunt Caroline had set up the ironing board and was pressing the backs of several squares of needlework. She didn’t look up.

      Aware that the woman preferred to be alone, Norah set her breakfast things into the sink and slipped away to her room upstairs.

      The rain was coming from the east and driving against the back of the house. When Norah took her toothbrush into the bathroom, little icy fingers were tapping at the window there, like someone scratching to get in. The thought that a stranger could be watching the house made Norah shiver. Even if he was just a boy. And was it her imagination, or was the boy getting closer to the house each time?

      Shortly, she heard Aunt Caroline come upstairs and walk along the hall to open the door of the room next to the bathroom. Norah followed as far as the doorway.

      “Oh, my mom would just love to have a spare room like this!” she exclaimed, stepping inside. “We don’t know where we’re going to put everything in our new apartment.”

      It was obvious that this was where Aunt Caroline stored everything she wanted out of sight. There was a fold-up bed, a number of stacking chairs, two metal racks of clothing in garment bags, a treadle sewing machine, a dressmaker’s dummy, a silver tea service swathed in plastic wrap and row upon row of pictures in frames, standing on the floor, turned face-in. The shelves that lined the walls held boxes of various sizes, all clearly labelled.

      “I saw one of those sewing machines in a museum once,” Norah remarked. “It’s cool how you don’t need electricity to run them. Just your own feet.”

      “Yes, I suppose anything that old is a museum piece,” agreed Aunt Caroline, dryly.

      Norah’s cheeks warmed. “I didn’t mean . . .”

      “Why not? It’s very old. I haven’t used it myself in a very long time.” Aunt Caroline opened the flaps on one large cardboard box and set the pieces she had been ironing inside.

      “So this is where you keep all your needlework,” Norah realized, peering into the box with her. “Did you finish that piece you were working on last night?” She picked up a square of needlepoint, filled with black-eyed Susans and brilliant butterflies. “It’s so colourful. Did you ever think about framing some of it, Aunt Caroline? You have enough here that you could decorate the whole house.” She met her aunt’s scowling gaze. “If you wanted to, I mean.”

      “Which I don’t. As I told you last evening, I do it to keep my hands busy. Nothing more.”

      Norah was standing next to the row of large, framed canvasses on the floor, and she turned the first one around to see the front. It was an oil painting of a vase filled with sunflowers—great, floppy circles of sunshine, dripping petals onto a blue tablecloth. “This is nice,” she said and reached to turn the next frame towards her.

      “They are all oil paintings,” Aunt Caroline informed her. “Please just leave them!”

      Norah pulled her hand back as if she had been burned.

      “They hung in this house for many years,” her great-aunt explained. “But I have no use for such things now.”

      “Why not?” Norah asked.

      “I have my reasons,” replied Caroline Stoppard. From the stony look on her aunt’s face, Norah knew the subject was closed.

      “I thought when you first came in here that you might be looking for your Christmas decorations,” Norah tried again. “I could help you find them and take them downstairs.”

      “Christmas isn’t until the twenty-fifth,” Caroline Stoppard retorted. “Or it was the last time I looked.”

      “I know. But that’s just five days from now. If you told me which box they’re in, maybe I could do the decorating for you. I’m really pretty good at it. Do you get a real tree?”

      “You won’t find any of that stuff up here, so there’s no sense poking about. I haven’t bothered celebrating anything in years,” the woman declared.

      It suddenly occurred to Norah that her father’s aunt might recognize another holiday this time of year. “My friend Ashley celebrates Hanukkah,” she began. “And in school we learned about . . .”

      “If I bothered with any of it, it would be Christmas,” Aunt Caroline snapped, cutting her short. “Come along now. I keep the door to this room shut to conserve heat.”

      For

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