Read In the Middle of the Night for Free Online Page A

bought her, the white hospital gown in the closet, at last.
    She was studying a folded newspaper in her lap when I came in. She looked up, her face revealing an expression I had never seen there before. My mind scurried to identify it. Anger still there, but more than that. Something calm and cold in her face and eyes, but also deadly.
    He went free
, she said.
    Who?
    The boy who started the fire. Who started it all.
    She brandished the newspaper, and I saw the picture of the boy, the headline:
    USHER CLEARED IN TRAGIC CASE
    The boy
, she said,
who
 …
    She looked away from me, stared out the window, as if searching the outdoors for something no one else could see. I saw her lips move as she finished the sentence, her voice so low that I couldn’t hear the words. Then she turned back to me, a terrible look in her eyes.
The boy who killed me
, she said.
    Admitting, at last, that she was Lazarus, after all.

Part Two

 
    T
his is what Denny’s father, John Paul Colbert, thought about in the middle of the night: how his life changed forever at the age of sixteen when he became assistant manager/head usher at the Globe Theater in downtown Wickburg, Massachusetts.
    His job was not as glamorous as it sounded. The Globe was a faded relic of Hollywood’s golden years, when ornate theaters featured velvet curtains and crystal chandeliers, and snappy ushers in military uniforms guided people to their seats. Those were the days of double features (two movies for the price of one), twelve-chapter cowboy serials at Saturday matinees and Milk Duds for five cents a box. What a time that was!
    At least, that’s the way Mr. Zarbor described those earlier times. Mr. Zarbor owned the Globe and he liked totell John Paul about the olden days before television came along and provided free movies at home.
    Worst of all, he said, were the shopping centers which later on brought the “cinemas,” a word Mr. Zarbor detested. “Cinema One and Two,” he lamented. “Made of cinder blocks. No velvet curtain—no curtains at all.”
    The Globe featured foreign movies that never made it to the shopping centers, and provided a place in downtown Wickburg for special programs like the annual Christmas show, when the
Nutcracker Suite
was presented for young and old alike, and appearances by old-time big bands. Mr. Zarbor loved variety acts—magicians, tap dancers, jugglers and acrobats. He was most proud of his annual “Monster Magic Show” each Halloween, a program for the city’s children, especially orphans and those in foster homes. Although the Wickburg Rotary Club was the official sponsor, John Paul’s father told him that Mr. Zarbor paid most of the acts out of his own pocket.
    John Paul worked at the theater weekends and two or three nights a week, depending on business. He sold tickets at the box office, swept the floors, ran errands. Mr. Zarbor was a good boss. He sympathized with John Paul and his family. They had arrived from Canada a few years before to start a new life in the United States. Mr. Zarbor had been an immigrant whose family had fled Hungary a generation earlier, when he was sixteen years old, exactly John Paul’s age. “You remind me of myself,” Mr. Zarbor said.
    In the United States, John Paul woke up every day with great expectations. His parents had been eager toleave the small parish north of Montreal in the Province of Quebec. His father, a quick-talking impatient man, claimed that the French-speaking people of Quebec were treated as second-class citizens by the Canadian government. He and John Paul’s mother spent their savings on their son’s education, sending him to a private school in Montreal where classes focused on the English language and U.S. culture and history. When he and his parents moved south, John Paul was ready, although he had certain doubts. Language, for one thing. He spoke without a heavy accent but his English was stilted and formal, learned from books and not from conversation. At