Safe Harbor by Luanne Rice

Author:Luanne Rice
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780553897142
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2003-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

AUNT DANA was grocery shopping or doing errands or something, and Quinn and Allie were supposed to be crabbing with Cameron and June, but that was for suckers. Let Allie follow the rules: Quinn had things to do.

First, a sweep of the house. It was rare these days to have the place all to herself. Either Aunt Dana was eagle-eyeing everything she did, or she got Grandma to do the job for her. Allie was practically Quinn’s shadow. If Quinn went into the kitchen, so did Allie. If she decided to watch TV, guess what Allie wanted to do? Quinn hardly ever had time to herself.

Sunlight poured through the windows. On nice days, their house was the sunniest place in the world. Her mother hadn’t liked curtains. She had loved light and air and the view so much, she had kept nearly all the windows bare. As Quinn walked through the house, checking out paintings and photos, books and the box of ashes, rays of sunlight lit her way.

Up the stairs, into her parents’ room. No one ever went in there. Quinn sat on the bed—first on her father’s side, then on her mother’s side. The coverlet was old and frayed, a quilt made by her mother’s grandmother. Placing her head on the pillow, Quinn closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Her mother’s smell—lemon shampoo, sunscreen, mint toothpaste—had worn off. Quinn partially rectified the situation by running to the bathroom, dabbing a dot of shampoo onto one finger, toothpaste on the other, and rubbing them onto the pillowcase. There—much better!

She catalogued the bedside table: the stack of books her mother always read, a few magazines, lots of letters from Aunt Dana, an address book, a little crystal ball that happened to be one of Quinn’s favorite things in the world. Similar to a snow globe, it contained a mermaid with long red hair and a green tail, and when Quinn shook it, instead of snowflakes, tiny fish swirled around.

Quinn laughed just as she had when she was a baby and her mother would shake the globe and say the magic words: “Mermaid come, tell me true, what’s a girl supposed to do?”

Comforted, Quinn continued her prowl. She opened the closet, pawed through her parents’ clothes. Her father’s suits and blazers on one side, her mother’s skirts and pants on the other. Quinn didn’t like the closet much; Grandma had strewn the place with mothballs before Quinn had been able to stop her.

Now her father’s bedside table—neater than her mother’s—with one half-read John le Carré book, a framed photo of “his girls,” and the best part—the glass of water he’d been drinking the night before he’d died. Quinn kept the level filled to the exact spot, about an inch above the bottom of the glass, to compensate for evaporation.

The bureau—a gold mine of contact. All their clothes, a few papers here and there, a junk drawer filled with memories and treasures. Quinn bypassed the bureau for now. She had other things to do before Aunt Dana came home, so she had to move fast.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.