Read After Her for Free Online Page A

noted.
    â€œMaybe he’s meeting a girlfriend up there,” I said. “Maybe he’s a spy.”
    â€œHe doesn’t look like the type,” Patty offered. As much as I would have liked to think otherwise, I had to agree, this was so. And anyway, Mr. Armitage’s hikes seldom lasted more than half an hour: a quick jaunt up the trail, then down again. My sister and I decided this was probably his fitness routine, though if so, it did not appear to be having much effect, so far. Like his wife, Mr. Armitage remained on the chubby side.
    One noteworthy fact about our new neighbors had to do with their landscaping efforts. Early on in their time on Morning Glory Court, Mr. Armitage had hired a man with a small tractorlike machine to come in and tear up the lawn, and we briefly imagined that the Armitages might be doing something exciting like putting in a pool or constructing an elaborate garden at least. But when the job was finished, it turned out all the Armitages had elected to do was rip out the grass of the lawn and replace it with concrete blocks. Karl Pollack, who’d spoken to Mr. Armitage around this time, as none of the rest of us on the street seemed to have done, reported that our neighbor had done this as a way of avoiding the inconvenience of yard maintenance and reducing his water bill.
    The other big disappointment where the Armitages were concerned had to do with their television set. At this point, our neighbor Helen’s husband, Tubby, was still alive, and he had taken to watching the shopping channel during the very time slot when we liked to catch our episodes of The Brady Bunch through their window. Viewing our show through the Pollacks’ window had also become an iffy proposition. (Their newborn son evidently suffered from colic, and they had recently acquired a VCR—a new invention—on which they tended, maddeningly, to play episodes of Mr. Rogers they’d taped for the purpose of getting Karl Jr. to sleep.) This had left Patty and me searching for a new viewing location for Drive-In Movie. Briefly, we’d thought of the Armitages.
    But unlike every other house on our side of the street that backed up against the mountain—whose TV sets we could see, glowing blue through their picture windows—it appeared the Armitages didn’t own a TV. Not one they kept in the living room anyway—the spot necessary for us to look in through the picture windows at night to catch our shows. This left us wondering how they spent their time.
    There was the dog, of course. Maybe they liked doing jigsaw puzzles, Patty suggested. Or Scrabble.
    But suppose the Armitages were living a secret life, as international jewel thieves, or spies? Maybe Mr. Armitage was one of those people who provide information about the mob to the FBI, and he and his wife had to go into hiding with a whole new identity. Maybe Mrs. Armitage had suffered a terrible accident that left her face horribly scarred, which accounted for her staying inside all the time, except for those rare walks in the night. As the Charlie’s Angels of Morning Glory Court, we would get to the bottom of their story.
    We started a scrapbook, devoted to Mr. Armitage. More accurately, I started the scrapbook. Patty just went along with it, as she did with most things I suggested.
    Years before, our mother had begun a scrapbook documenting my babyhood, but she’d stopped keeping it up after a couple of months, which had left many blank pages. I saw no harm in ripping out the pictures devoted to me: my newborn footprint, a photograph showing our mother, with an expression I barely recognized, of eagerness and hope, and our young and lanky father—skinnier than we’d ever known him, with a cowlick—wrapping his arms around the two of us in a gesture that would have made you think no harm could ever befall this family. The entries—daily at first—had slacked off dramatically around the point of my