The Evidence Against Her by Robb Forman Dew

Author:Robb Forman Dew [Dew, Robb Forman]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: World, cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780759526068
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2001-09-18T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

ON SATURDAY, April 6, 1918, the morning of her nineteenth birthday, Agnes woke under the lingering influence of what must have been a pleasant dream. She tried to regain it for some long, drowsy minutes, but she couldn’t fall back into it. Her mother always said, though, that you would have good luck during any day you woke up from a happy dream. And Agnes felt lucky. The idea of her day shaped itself into an orderly staircase of tasks she meant to get done, and she unbunched her pillow and stretched out flat under her quilt, looking forward to a length of time in which the hours had already taken on a safe, thick, busy quality.

She would need to check over the sidesaddle in case it needed cleaning, and she wanted to give Bandit a bath if it got warm enough, and that would take up the greater part of the late morning and early afternoon. But the job she most looked forward to, and which she ran through in her mind in great detail, was the business of pressing her new riding habit, being especially careful not to iron in a crease along the elegant roll of the lapel and not to use an iron on the skirt at all but to hang it over steam, as her mother’s aunt Cettie had directed. For the first time in months, Agnes lay in bed considering her day without even a single thought of Warren Scofield entering her head.

The weather was not breezy, but the sky was bright blue with high, rushing clouds, so that when Agnes was in the barn checking over the saddle she happened to glance up long enough to get the rather pleasing but disconcerting impression that the very spot where she stood was spinning away from the sky. It was partly the effect of the distant, streaky, racing clouds and partly just the elation that follows a period of brooding. By midmorning the temperature had risen enough that she took off her old barn jacket and rolled up her sleeves. She set out buckets of water to warm in the sun, and after lunch she went about giving Bandit a bath.

Her mother joined her in the barn, bringing along a bar of her fine-milled French soap with its wonderful smell of fading roses—roses with their petals blown but that give off a heavy last perfume that’s so profuse the scent lingers with sweet, round bitterness on the back of the tongue. “Can I help, Agnes? I’ve brought some of my scented soap out.” Her mother was timid about asking, and Agnes was surprised and delighted.

“That would be wonderful, Mama.” She felt shy in the face of her mother’s goodwill and amiability.

“When we get done he’ll smell like a garden,” her mother said. And Catherine rolled up her sleeves as well, put on the cobbler’s apron that always hung on the tack room door, and went to work with Agnes.

They sponged and lathered Agnes’s horse,

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