Read Death Qualified for Free Online Page B

trees that her great-grandfather had planted.
     
        Gradually the noises and movements of the open forest had resumed. Small rustlings in the high grasses; two thrashers revealed their red under wings as they flew by; a jay called, another answered. Nell nodded. All was well again.
     
        She returned to the truck, deposited the rifle on the passenger seat, and drove slowly back to the little house that she occupied with her two children. The big house was screened from view by lilacs as big as trees themselves, and blooming rhododendrons from palest pink to scarlet, yellow, orange, white. She parked in the drive outside the garage because she would have to go out again to pick up her daughter, Carol. She took the rifle out and walked into the house. It had been built by her great-grandfather of half-split cedar logs, and no one had ever seen any need to do anything in the way of maintenance beyond keeping the windows and doors in good repair. The cedar shake roof was the original roof. The garage was a recent addition, from thirty years ago, and inside the house insulation had been added. Other than those changes, it was the way her great-grandfather had planned it, the way he had left it finally.
     
        "Travis?" she called at the living room door.
     
        "Hey, Travis, where are you?"
     
        She went to the foot of the stairs and called again, but she knew he was down by the river. She had known that from the time she had raced away from Turner's Point. At first, all she had been able to think was. Dear God, let him not have seen that body! Halfway home she had kept a watch for him on his bike. If he had seen, he would be tearing off for another look; she would have passed him on the gravel road. But even so, she had to make certain.
     
        Her pace quickened as she left the house by the back door.
     
        There was a lawn, twenty feet wide, and then a steep descent to the river. The river made a sharp turn here, leaving her side with a stretch of gravelly sand and slow-moving water, while on the far side it was very deep and swift against the cliff.
     
        At the top of the bank she saw Travis out in the drift boat, fifteen feet from shore. He was lying back, one arm over his eyes against the late afternoon sun, one leg dangling over the boat rail.
     
        "Travis! Get in here!" She scrambled down the bank to the beach.
     
        He sat up, pulled in his foot, and grinned at her.
     
        "It's tied. Mom."
     
        "You get in here right now! Right this minute!"
     
        "I want to stay out. You know, I might be able to get in the Guinness Book if I stay out here a few days. Bet no one's ever done that before."
     
        "Travis, I'm warning you." She shook the rifle and saw his eyes widen.
     
        "You fire that shot?" he asked.
     
        "Why?"
     
        "You don't start hauling in by the time I count to three, you'd better hunker down in one end of that boat or the other, because I'm going to shoot it full of holes." She didn't wait for him to acknowledge the threat.
     
        "One."
     
        Travis began to pull hand over hand on the rope that tethered him to a great rock on shore.
     
        He was muttering as he came in.
     
        "You do it all the time.
     
        We all do it. Why not me? Even if I fell in, the water's only up to my knees. What's the big deal?"
     
        She knew all this. And they did it all the time; it was the only way fishing was possible. They had to get out close to the end of the shallow water or their hooks snagged when they reeled in their lines.
     
        "You never said I couldn't do it alone," Travis continued as he climbed out of the boat and finished pulling it in halfway up the beach where he tied the line.
     
        "I'm saying it now," Nell said.
     
        "You don't go out alone.
     
        Never. You don't go out there unless a grownup is here.
     
        Is that