Page 187 - Where the Dream Ends ebook

Ships in the Night

cutting the stalks. By the end of June, he was sick of asparagus.
Now the neglected asparagus patch was consumed by weeds.
The asparagus continued to grow however, so that the garden
looked like an alien landscape guarded by plumed soldiers.

The cottage was on the side of a hill in the middle of an old
apple orchard. At the top of the hill, a stone wall separated the
orchard from a field used by a neighboring farmer for graz-
ing a small herd of cattle. As Eddie walked from the driveway
around to the front of the house, he could see the silhouettes
of the animals standing motionless in the field.

Behind the cottage, the land sloped downward from the
driveway to woods that harbored a mixture of oak, tulip and
hemlock. A small stream trickled down the hill through the
woods toward the road.

The cottage itself had only one room with a brick floor and
a wall of glass and screens looking out over the apple orchard.
There were two studio beds along the back wall, and above
them a narrow window that ran the entire length of the room
and seemed to have been designed to capture the light of the
moon as it moved across the sky. There was a vaulted ceiling
with storage space at one end. A free-standing fireplace with a
bright red stovepipe reached skyward from one corner of the
room. At the other end of the room, a tiny working kitchen
looked out over the asparagus patch and beyond to some ma-
ple trees, overgrown brush and shrubbery that isolated the side
of the house from the road below.

There was an enormous bathroom almost as large as the
living room. It had an old claw foot bathtub, a small dresser

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