The Freedom Maze Read Online Free Page B

Orleans, her job, and Soule College. Before she went, she gave Sophie a light hug. “Good-bye, darling.”
    Sophie buried her face in her mother’s familiar smell of Shalimar perfume and fresh-ironed cotton. Mama patted her back and pushed her gently away. “Be good for your Aunt Enid, now.”
    She got into the Ford and drove off, leaving a large, hot silence behind her.
    “Well,” Aunt Enid said. “That’s that.”
    She went back into the house, and Sophie kicked the bottom step so hard she had to sit down and squeeze her toe.
    The screen door squeaked and Aunt Enid reappeared. “I brought you some lemonade.”
    “I’m not thirsty, thank you,” Sophie said without looking up.
    Aunt Enid set the frosted glass beside her. “In case you change your mind.”
    Sophie nodded. A moment later, she felt a light touch on her hair. Then the steps squeaked under Aunt Enid’s feet and the parlor door opened and closed.
    What was wrong with her, Sophie wondered, that everyone left her? Was it her frizzy hair? Her glasses? Was it because she read all the time? Would Papa have taken her to New York with him if she’d been the young lady Mama wanted her to be, who read
Seventeen
magazine and knew all the words to “Teen Angel”?
    Because then she was doomed.
    Sophie wiped her face and got up. Now Mama was gone, she was free to explore. She’d start with the garden shed, poke her nose into the maze, maybe even mount an expedition to the Big House, assuming there was anything left of it to find.
    Close to, the garden shed looked like a woodcutter’s cottage from a fairy tale, with two small windows peeping out among the vines and a low wooden bench by the half-open door. She pushed it all the way open and went inside.
    Given Aunt Enid’s housekeeping habits, Sophie was surprised to see that her gardening tools were clean and polished and laid out neatly on an old wooden table. The rest of the room was a jumble of broken furniture and flowerpots piled higgledy-piggledy between the door and a huge stone fireplace that took up nearly the whole back wall.
    Sophie knew perfectly well that young ladies did not crawl into fireplaces, no matter how big, much less stick their heads up the chimney. She did it anyway, right on through a sticky barrier of ancient cobwebs. When she’d finished picking the clinging threads out of her hair, she settled her glasses and looked up into a close and total blackness that smelled sourly of old wood smoke and soot.
    Luminescent amber eyes opened above her, narrowed a little, then winked.
    Sophie gave a startled yelp. The eyes disappeared. There was a faint scrabbling, a shower of soot, and the chimney was clear.
    Sophie ducked out of the fireplace, blundered out the door, and scanned the roof. Yes, something was definitely moving among the leaves, something splotched black and white and reddish-brown like a calico cat. It leaped down from the roof to her feet, grinned at her, and took off across the field at a leisurely lope.
    Sophie hesitated a moment, then took off after it, slipping on the wet grass and banging her toes on loose rocks. About a stone’s throw from the maze, she ran out of breath and had to stand with her hands on her thighs, panting.
    When she stood up again, the strange animal was squatting between the two stone urns, for all the world like it was waiting for her. Sophie could have sworn it waved at her before it turned and disappeared.
    She ran through the gap, tripped over something hidden in the tall grass, and fell flat on her face, gulping like a fish.
    “You is a
fine
specimen, you is.”
    Sophie sat up and pushed her glasses up her sweaty nose. A corridor walled with dusty leaves curved gently away from her in both directions.
    “Who’s there?” she called.
    “Come find me and see.”
    The voice was high and light, like a little child’s — a colored child. Sophie got to her feet.
    “That animal I saw in the garden shed — is that your pet?”
    A giggle. “You