The Freedom Maze Read Online Free Page A

No use doing two or three little washings when one big one will do.” Aunt Enid turned off the water. “Why don’t you go up and see if Mama wants anything?”
    Mama went, her opinion of Aunt Enid’s housekeeping unspoken but clear as glass.
    Aunt Enid hung her apron by the door. “Come see my office, Sophie. I think you’ll like it.”
    She was right. Sophie stood in the open door and stared, enchanted, at the cozy clutter of rose clippers, garden gloves, seed packets, and balls of brightly colored yarn. Books filled the shelves that covered the walls, bristled from two free-standing rotating bookcases, lay in shifting piles on the long table behind the sofa and the giant desk under the windows.
    Aunt Enid stepped over and around the clutter to the big square fireplace at the end of the room and took a pipe off the mantel. “That was your great-grandpap’s,” she said, laying it in Sophie’s hands. “I have the whole collection around here somewhere.”
    Sophie rubbed her thumb over the pipe bowl. The polished wood felt like silk.
    There was horrified gasp from the door. Sophie jumped guiltily and thrust the pipe behind her back as Mama found her voice. “This place is a pigsty, Enid! How you can live like this, heaven alone knows. Daddy must be turning over in his grave!”
    Sophie’s hands tightened nervously, but Aunt Enid just snorted. “I expect he’s gotten used to it by now. Did Mama finish her breakfast?”
    Mama looked irked. “She did. And now she says she wants her bath, but I don’t think I can get her out of bed by myself.”
    “There’s a trick to it,” Aunt Enid said. “I’ll come up and help you.”
    “Thank you,” said Mama, and the two sisters exchanged tight smiles that made Sophie think having a sister wasn’t really as much fun as
Little Women
made it seem.
    Left alone, Sophie explored the library, finding a complete set of Dickens and several paperback mysteries with titles like
The Saint in Action
and
Hot Ice
that looked a whole lot more exciting than Nancy Drew. Around dinnertime, the morning rain cleared and Aunt Enid took Sophie on a tour of the garden.
    It was a lot more businesslike than Mama’s garden in Metairie, with vegetables as well as flowers, and more kinds of roses than Sophie had known existed. Aunt Enid hunkered right down by the okra and started picking bugs off its leaves and squishing them between her fingers.
    Mama glanced at Sophie and wrinkled her nose. Sophie wrinkled back, relieved that things were back to normal again. For now.
    Supper that night was actually fun. Sophie picked okra out of Ofelia’s chicken fricassee and listened to her aunt and her mother reminisce about being the Fairchild girls of Oak River, with special emphasis on the numerous beaux who had squired Mama to church picnics and danced with her at parties.
    “You got the best-looking ones,” Aunt Enid said. “But my beaux had spirit. Remember when that William Kenner dared Jeff Woodley to spend a night in the Big House, and he fell through the steps and broke his leg?”
    “Served him right,” Mama said. “Wasn’t it Jeff who tied Cleo’s old apron on Apollo?”
    Aunt Enid grinned. “No, that was Burney Fitzhugh. You remember how Mama wanted Daddy to get rid of all the statues in the maze? He told her, ‘They’re not naked, Isabel, they’re nude. Naked is wickedness. Nude is art.’ I thought she’d pop a vein, she was so mad.”
    Sophie remembered the dark blob she’d seen from her window. Could that be the maze? And did it still have naked statues in it? Maybe, when Mama was gone back to New Orleans, she’d take a look for herself.
    “Probably gone to rack and ruin now,” Mama said. “Didn’t we have fun, Enid, losing Cousin Nick in it?”
    “What a nuisance that boy was!” Aunt Enid said.
    “Still is, according to Elizabeth,” Mama said. And they plunged into family gossip, much to Sophie’s disappointment.
    On Sunday afternoon, Mama went back to New