Buttons and Bones Read Online Free Page B

ceiling ran up past the rafters to the boards of the roof. There was badly worn pink linoleum in the dining area and a flattened, elderly, gray-blue carpet on the living room area. The windows were small, about four feet above the floor, and twice as wide as they were high.
    The adults and children were standing in the dining area furnished with an elderly card table and three folding chairs. The air was warm but musty—Lars went to pull open a window.
    A pot-bellied stove squatted on a metal plate that crossed the border between the dining and living areas. Beyond it were a sofa and chair made of yellow logs, each with folded dark blue blankets and sleeping bags in lieu of cushions.
    A small, seriously out-of-date kitchen was on their right—the stove actually appeared to be the sort that burned wood, and the refrigerator was an old-fashioned ice box—which explained the two large bags of ice cubes in the rearmost part of the SUV. There was a windowed back door on the far wall leading to a back porch. The place was shabby but orderly.
    “Nice!” pronounced Erik cheerfully. Though not yet two, he had a budding vocabulary.
    “Are we going to sleep here?” asked Emma, not happily.
    “Yes, darling. You and Erik get the bedroom; Mama and Daddy will sleep on the back porch.”
    “Where is the bedroom?” asked Emma.
    “Over here.” Jill led the way to the farther of two doors, which opened into a room about twelve by twelve. It had a full-size bed with a foam-rubber mattress. “We threw the old mattress out,” she said to Betsy. “The mice had made an apartment building of it.”
    Emma laughed. “Apar’ment building for the mice!”
    There was an ancient, dark brown wicker chest of drawers, a matching wicker bookcase, and a wicker nightstand. A battery lantern, the kind with a hard plastic shade, was on the nightstand.
    “You’ll each get your sleeping bag and you’ll sleep side by side, comfortable as two bugs in a rug.”
    “Bug!” shouted Erik joyously. “Bug!” He made a wet buzzing noise and laughed.
    “Will we hear the loons tonight?” asked Betsy.
    Emma said anxiously, “No, no, they aren’t here.”
    “Yes, they are,” said Jill firmly. She added, to Betsy, “She’s heard them on camping trips and is afraid of them.”
    Lars said, “If you hear them and they scare you, you come and tell me.”
    “If I cry, you will make them go away!” said Emma Beth, pleased.
    “No, for two reasons. Can you guess what they are?”
    Emma Beth shook her head.
    “First, because they can’t hurt you. In fact, they are very shy and afraid of people. They’re just birds, about the size of ducks. You aren’t afraid of ducks, are you?”
    Emma shook her head, smiling at the notion that she’d be afraid of a duck.
    “Second, because this is their home. You wouldn’t like it if someone bigger than us came and chased us out of our house, would you?”
    “You wouldn’t let them!”
    “Well, if they were bigger than me—”
    “Nobody’s bigger than you, Daddy!”
    Lars laughed. He was six feet, six inches tall and proportionately broad, a blond Viking with narrow, sea gray eyes, and perhaps a touch too much jaw. “That’s mostly true, I guess. But people here have agreed to share the lake with the loons and the ducks and the turtles. And what does that mean about the loons?”
    Emma conceded, “We don’t bother them. But they bother us!”
    “No, they bother you . I like them.”
    Emma turned to her mother with a pleading face. “No, honey face,” said Jill, “I like them, too.”
    “Nice!” contributed Erik, unsolicited.
    So Emma turned to her godmother. “Do you like loons?”
    Betsy said, “I don’t know. I want to sit up tonight and listen for them. Then I’ll tell you.”
    Jill said, “I think that’s a good idea. Now come on, I’ll show you the rest of the place and tell you our plans for it.”
    The bathroom had been furnished in the fifties with a secondhand pedestal sink and a