Read The House That Jack Built for Free Online Page A

smaller than Effie remembered it, and it wasn't just closed, it was half tumbled down. It was set in a clearing on the left-hand side of the road, overshadowed by giant oak trees, an empty clapboard building with a sagging verandah and a skeletal roof. Most of the windows had been broken, and the gutters were filled with landslides of weather-bleached shingles.
        Craig turned the car into the parking-lot, and tugged on the handbrake. 'Looks like lunch is off,' he said. 'Where shall we go to now?'
        Effie climbed out of the car and walked up to the inn's front steps. Nineteen years ago, climbing these steps with her father, she never would have believed that she would ever come back here, to find the inn looking like this. She stepped up to the front doors, and peered inside. The doors had once had panels of decorative stained glass, through which she could peer while she was waiting for her parents to finish paying the bill or powdering their noses or whatever it was that parents did to drag each minute beyond the bounds of endurance. She used to imagine that each pane of coloured glass gave her a secret view of a world which was never normally visible: a red world, a green world, and a sickly amber world.
        Once - through the red glass - she had seen a man in a homburg hat walking across the parking-lot. When she had looked through the clear glass, he had vanished.
        She heard the car door slam behind her as Craig came up to join her. The front doors were chained and padlocked, but she could clearly see through to the dining room, with its view of the stream that ran down the rocks at the back, although the stream was clogged with grass now and there was no furniture in the room except for a single tilted-over chair.
        'Memories, hmm?' said Craig, looking up at the dilapidated roof.
        She nodded. 'Dad took me here on my eighteenth birthday.'
        Craig unexpectedly laid his hand on her shoulder, and gave it a squeeze. Effie turned and looked at him, but his head was turned.
        'I like it here,' he said, almost as if he couldn't believe it himself.
        'I'm pleased. I always did. There were two lovely people who used to run it, Mr. and Mrs. Berryman. They loved cooking and they loved making people feel contented and happy. Mrs. Berryman used to let me go into the kitchen and make pastry-people.'
        They went back down the steps. In the distance, they could see the blueish peaks of the Hudson Highlands, and the darker cloud-cloaked outline of Storm King Mountain. They could have been alone in the world, here by this deserted and broken-down inn, explorers of a long-lost civilisation. Whippoorwills called sadly from hill to hill.
        'Did you ever go up as far as Valhalla?' asked Craig.
        She shook her head. 'We came up here to eat, we ate, we went home. Dad was always promising to go for a walk in the woods, but he never did. He was always too full.'
        'I'd like to see what Valhalla is.'
        'It's just somebody's house.'
        'All the same, I'd like to see it.'
        Effie said, 'Okay.' She didn't mind what they did, so long as Craig remained as affable as this. He hadn't been so relaxed since the day before his 'accident', and she was beginning to think that this enforced vacation was really going to work.
        This morning, he had dressed in a camel-coloured linen suit, with a sky-blue shirt, a city dweller's ultimate concession to the countryside. But now he stripped off his coat and rolled up his sleeves and twisted open two more shirt buttons. 'I shouldn't have worn these goddamned loafers,' he said. 'I'll see if I can pick up some Timberlands when we get back to Cold Spring.'
        'You? In Timberlands?'
        He grinned, and patted her on the back. 'I'm on vacation, I'm allowed.'
        Up above the Red Oaks Inn, the gradient was so steep that Craig had to shift down into 2. But after a few minutes of laboured