Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

space. The main supporting beams remained, as did a portion of the ceiling that had before entirely hidden the attic and roof above. The bare wood floor, too, had been exposed but had then been sanded and finished to a gleam. The windows, drapeless, sparkled. They were filled with the blue of the sky and the myriad greens of the trees, as if they were changeable paintings.

One end of the room held a polished brass bed, its immaculate white spread stitched with a wreath of roses. Next to the bed, a simple wooden table held a lamp made from a bottle of red glass and a painted shade. There was a small wicker wardrobe, a braided rug, a jug of clover on the windowsill.

On the other side of the room, in one large corner, was a hodgepodge of bookcases, all filled with books. Each case was topped with motley stuff: colored bottles shot with sunlight; a spiny blowfish; a coffee mug full of birds’ feathers; a large conch shell; a fan of coral; a childish purple crock. On the floor was a plain blue rug. On the rug was an old rocking chair. On the chair was an open book.

The rest of the room was filled with odds and ends, piles of colorful pillows, good prints, a huge desk heaped with books and papers, and, against one wall, a deep fireplace of red brick with a simple wooden mantelpiece. Over the fireplace hung a portrait of a young man and woman with their arms around each other.

“That was my one extravagance,” she said. “I had it painted from a picture I found in my mother’s scrapbook. The rest of this stuff I bought at flea markets or rummage sales.”

“It’s really something,” Joe said, wandering around the room. Above them, in the part of the room that had no ceiling, the peaked roof of the house seemed high. “You won’t be too cold in the winter?”

“I had them insulate between the rafters before they paneled the inside. I think it’ll be okay.”

“What’s the loft for?” In one half of the room the wooden ceiling and attic remained but had been finished off with a triangular wall. “And how in the world do you get up there?”

Rachel pointed toward a slender, rod-shaped handle that hung down from the ceiling. When Joe pulled on it, it brought a portion of the ceiling about as big as a door slowly downward on a set of hinges. As this hatch tilted open, a set of stairs, built on rollers and fixed to runners on the upper face of the hatch, slid gently down until the bottom step came to rest on the floor below. “Ingenious,” said Joe.

“It’s just for storage,” Rachel said. “I keep the other seasons up there.”

“Other seasons?”

“This is summer,” she said, looking around the great room.

In October Rachel traded the wicker, the white spread, the blow-fish and the seashells, the colored glass and pillows for a big wooden blanket box, cream-colored drapes, a patchwork bedspread, an overstuffed chair, and the dozen wooden creatures that Joe had carved for her during the summer, among them a sandpiper and a miniature cat.

Rachel was curled up in the fat chair, reading a book and half sleeping one Saturday morning in October when she heard a knock at her door, the sound of it opening, and a voice, down below, yelling, “Hey, Rachel. It’s me, Angela. Come on out and play.”

“Go away,” she yelled back.

“No kidding, Rachel. Get your ass down here.”

Which is when it occurred to Rachel that Angela should have been at the Kitchen, busy with the last of the breakfast crowd.

“What’s wrong?” she said, hopping down the stairs with her shoes half on.

“Everything or nothing, depending.”

“Depending on what?”

“Depending on how you feel about Belle Haven’s dearly departed.” She opened the door and stepped out onto the porch.

Rachel threw on her coat. “What?”

“Just follow me, pal,” Angela said, her apron hanging out from underneath her coat, nurse’s shoes on her feet. “And bring your keys.”

They took Rachel’s truck down the hill, over the bridge, past the Kitchen, toward the western edge of town, to park outside the church where Rachel’s parents had always taken her. There were already a number of cars along the street, and the church lot was full.

“Come on, Angela. What’s going on?”

“I honestly don’t know for sure, Rachel. Rusty came busting into the Kitchen a little while ago with some wild story about skeletons surfacing out here, and everybody decided to come and have a look, I guess. Ophelia didn’t even finish her waffles, which is a first as far as I know. Rusty was back on his bike before anybody could get another word out of him. So I finished making pancakes, left my mother in charge, and decided to see what’s up. Not skeletons, I hope.”

Rachel didn’t say a word. She knew how Angela must be feeling, despite the wisecracks. Angela’s father was buried here. So were her grandparents. Rachel’s, too. There was nothing to be laughing about, if what Rusty had said was true.

It was, but the state of things in the graveyard at the edge of town might have remained hidden forever if not for the fact that Sophia Browning missed her husband.

After her house had burned ten months before, Sophia had moved to Randall to live with her son and his family. She had missed everything about Belle Haven, but most of all she had missed her daily walk to the graveyard to visit her darling Otto, talk to him, cry for him, remember him. It was so difficult, now, to come every day from Randall. She could not drive; her son and his wife were too busy to take her more than once a week. And so, even though she had never imagined leaving Belle Haven herself or disturbing her husband’s remains, she had finally talked to the authorities about the laws that governed the handling of the long dead.

What she discovered alarmed her: