Read Save Johanna! for Free Online Page B

repairs. Only the chimney was intact and, in keeping with the shabbiness of the rest of the house, was black with soot.
    Totally out of place in its shiny newness was a Harley Davidson motorcycle sporting every imaginable chrome attachment, leaning against the side of the house. More in keeping was the splattered can of white paint with a hardened paintbrush lying on the ground next to it. On the other side of the door was a pile of empty beer cans and used frozen-food containers alongside a mound of poorly cut logs.
    No sounds rose from the house until the door was suddenly kicked open by a sandaled foot, and a young, slim, redheaded woman came out, her arms loaded with wet laundry. Her name was Imogene. She wore shorts cut from bleached jeans and had a red and yellow bandana tied tightly around her chest, flattening her small breasts. Her red hair was long and busy with curls that picked up the sun, giving it sparkling orange and gold highlights. She was pretty, almost beautiful, with peach-tinted skin that deepened to pink on her cheeks and to rose on her bow-shaped lips. She had large, round blue eyes under perfectly arched brows, a small, straight nose, dimpled chin, tiny ears—there wasn’t a mistake on her entire face, yet it lacked the animation of true beauty. Dominating the girl’s countenance was an odd lifelessness.
    She walked carefully, trying to peek over her bundle of wash. Once she tripped slightly on a stone and one of the wet socks dropped to the ground, but she couldn’t see it so she continued on around to the back of the house.
    She dumped the clothes on the slanting plastic top of a broken old bridge table with one collapsing leg. Another sock began to slide down, but she retrieved it.
    Without much interest she began flinging the wet clothes over a clothesline that ran from a corner window out some fifteen feet to a slender oak tree. At first the T-shirts and jeans were fairly well spread out, but as she neared the end of the rope and ran out of space, the clothes began overlapping one another, and where the line wrapped around the tree they were hopelessly piled in a never-drying mound.
    As soon as the last shirt was piled over the line she started back to the house. As she passed the dropped sock, without missing a step she kicked it into the open space under the house. Once in front of the house, she untied the bandana around her chest and wrapped it around her head to catch some of the curls and hold them off her perspiring neck. Her small, firm breasts had dark nipples that matched the rose of her lips and were as perfectly shaped. She sat down on a large, flat rock to one side of the doorway, waiting, doodling circles with a broken twig in the hard, dry dirt at her feet.
    Five or ten minutes passed and then she heard what she was waiting for, the unmistakable whine of a motorcycle in the distance, and her dull blue eyes took on a slight sparkle. In seconds the sound became a roar as the bike sped over the pitted road, motor screaming as it hit the bumps and spun off the ground and then thumped down only to hit another bump. From the sound, it had to be going fifty miles an hour.
    Imogene strained to see the bike through the trees, but she knew it could only be Avrum. No one else took that road at such speed. Pleasure and excitement filled the emptiness of her face, and her lips spread into a smile of delight. Avrum was coming! She jumped up, her slim body arching expectantly, perfectly still. Waiting.
    Moments later bike and rider burst through an opening in the thickly matted underbrush and skidded to a stop, sending a cloud of dry dirt flying in every direction.
    The fine spray whipped Imogene’s naked legs, making her jump back momentarily. But before the dust had settled she was smiling and walking through it to greet Avrum. He seemed distracted by some private annoyance and barely nodded to her as he swung off the bike, his left leg arching gymnast-style over the handlebars.
    Once off