The Guardian Stones by Eric Reed

Author:Eric Reed
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Published: 2015-09-21T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-six

Joe Haywood did not answer Grace’s knock.

The front door was locked. The back door, sagging on its hinges, its lock long gone, was secured from the inside by a chain.

Grace stepped back and scanned the house. “I remember when old Jasper lived here,” she told Edwin. “Louisa Wainman’s father. Even then he’d been too old to work the farm for years. He left all that to Harry Wainman.”

The crumbling walls might have been held together by the ivy growing on them. The roof, sunken in spots, was green with moss. To Edwin, the structure looked as if it might have been only slightly predated by the Guardian Stones. “His name was Jasper?”

“Oh, that’s what we called him because he yelled at anyone who came within sight of the place. One of us kids read about a villain named Jasper and the name stuck.”

“There are a lot of Jaspers in the world.” Edwin wondered who Grace’s childhood friends had been. He hadn’t seen many women her age in Noddweir. Most of the men were off to war. A lot of young people, both women and men, didn’t wait for a war to leave an isolated village.

Grace went to the nearest window and pressed her face to the glass. Edwin waited, standing thigh-deep in the weeds that ran right up to the house. Unseen insects whirred and ratcheted. Pieces of abandoned, rusted farm equipment stuck up from the weeds, the bones of mechanical dinosaurs. Where the tall grass ended, impassable brambles began. Behind the brambles lay the forest, a painted backdrop, without shadow or depth on this humid, cloudy day.

“The glass is filthy,” Grace said. “I don’t think it’s been cleaned since he lived here.”

Edwin forded the grass to the window next to the one where Grace stood. He gingerly cleared away a gray lace of decayed spider webs and bent his head forward until his thick eyeglasses clicked against the window pane.

This window was not entirely opaqued by dirt. In the muted light of the interior he saw a room half-filled with crates and cardboard boxes. A tarpaulin was thrown over something in one corner and several canvases were wrapped around mysterious bundles.

Grace’s hair brushed his cheek and he felt her face beside his as she moved over to peer inside.

“The Wainmans might be using the place for storage,” she offered.

“I don’t see any dust on those boxes.”

“You’re right.”

“Do you think there might be a cellar door we could try?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” She clapped her hand to Edwin’s shoulder. “Let’s get back to the village. It’s ridiculous, but I feel like Jasper is going to burst out of the house and start shouting at us.”

She must have been subconsciously aware of footsteps behind them, Edwin later realized, because when they turned from the window, Joe Haywood stood twenty feet away, pointing a service revolver at them. “What do you two think you’re doing?”

Edwin thought it odd a conscientious objector would be armed, but if Haywood intended to frighten Grace he hadn’t succeeded.

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