Tropical Freeze: Thorn series Book 2 (Thorn Novels) by James Hall

Author:James Hall [Hall, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781453223475
Publisher: James W. Hall
Published: 2016-11-16T06:00:00+00:00

19

As she rolled her wheelchair down the ramp, Priscilla Spottswood grinned at Thorn as if he were her own lost son come home at last. She was wearing bib overalls and a yellow T-shirt and a blue-and-white-striped railroad engineer’s hat. Her white hair loose and long, still full of luster. Three cats chased after her, swatting at her rubber wheels, as she rolled over to him across the concrete driveway.

It was midmorning Tuesday. The sky clear except for some cumulus along the horizon. Like distant, misty Himalayas. It had warmed up now to the middle sixties, low humidity, a light northern breeze. Good breathing weather.

As Thorn crossed the yard to her, she brought her chair to a stop, shook her head, smiling, and said, “Goddamn you, boy. Goddamn you all to hell.”

He bent down and gave her a hug, her bony arms clenching him hard around the neck, her parched lips on his cheek. He took in the chalky, chapped smell of her.

Priscilla had been head librarian for the upper Keys for forty years. Retired now and just in time, because her hearing was shot. Her voice so loud, she would’ve rattled the card catalog.

Her blue eyes had grown milky. And there was a long corridor behind them where she disappeared every now and then, coming back with a secret smile.

“I’ve been guilty of neglect,” Thorn said. “Not hugging the ones I love.”

“If your excuses aren’t full of passion and drama, I don’t want to hear ’em.” She rolled backwards a couple of feet. “Well, stand still and let me look at you.” She took him in up and down, stayed on his face for a moment. “You’re in love again, now aren’t you?”

“A little, maybe.”

“Foshkatosh,” she said. “A little, nothing.”

Her houseboat, the Miss Priss 5, sat up on concrete blocks twenty feet from the shore. A wide gangplank ran down from the deck. In the middle of the starboard wall a five-foot gash had been cut out and was sealed over with a plastic tarp.

Thorn nodded at the boat, asked her what had happened to it.

“I’m putting in a fireplace and chimney.”

“No.”

“Oh, yeah, I am. I always did want a chimney and fireplace, a mantel to put all my bric-a-brac on. So I thought, well now, old woman, you haven’t got but about thirty seconds left to live, you better get on with doing what you’d always wanted to do. So now I got to make myself live one more winter so I can enjoy the goddamn thing.”

A black and white kitten jumped up in her lap and circled a couple of times and curled up. Priscilla petted it, smiling at Thorn, shaking her head, looking him over some more.

“Who is she, the lucky girl? Do I know this one?”

“You know her. Darcy Richards.”

“Little Darcy Richards? Well, she’s had a crush on you for just the last twenty-five years. And you just noticed.”

“I’m a slow learner.”

“You keep letting them slip through your life, you’ll end up like me, married to a hundred cats and waking up at three in the morning dreaming somebody just called out your name.

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.