As You Wish (The Summerhouse 3)

“Only if you tell more of the story.” Elise stood up.

“I agree,” Kathy said as they left the kitchen.

Chapter Sixteen

Summer Hill, Virginia 1970

Olivia woke when a bunch of pebbles rained down on her body. They were followed by the muffled giggles of two kids, then the sound of their running away.

She didn’t open her eyes. She knew she was lying under the big magnolia tree and that she’d been sound asleep. A stick was poking her in the back, but she didn’t mind. The air was heavy with warmth and fragrance. For weeks now she’d rarely left the kitchen and she was sick of it! Onions, tomatoes, cucumbers. She wasn’t sure she ever again wanted to see any of them.

And it was all the fault of that boy! The way he’d raised gravestones without any help. Tore away briars with his bare hands. Built things. Restored. Repaired.

It was all totally disgusting—and she’d had enough of him.

With a sigh, she opened her eyes and looked up at the underside of the big, beautiful tree. Uncle Freddy said his mother had planted it and that’s why there was a statue of her under it. The kids said she was the queen of a planet called Athena—they’d heard the name from Uncle Freddy—and they made flower garlands to drape on her.

Olivia knew she had to get up. She had jam to make. Soup to cook. Chickens to roast. “Wonder what phenomenal things he’s done while I was sleeping,” she muttered.

When she started to lift her hand, she couldn’t. “What in the world?” She tried to sit up, but she seemed to be tied to the ground.

She gave a sharp tug to her arm and it broke away. Lying still, on her back, she held up her arm and looked at it. There were about a dozen strands of various colors of sewing thread over her arm.

Slowly, she sat up. Each movement pulled threads away from where they were tied to clothespins that had been pushed into the soft ground.

Her annoyance changed to amazement. How in the world had the children done this Lilliputian task? She’d seen a big, illustrated version of Gulliver’s Travels in Letty’s room. Had the children tried to copy it?

“What the hell?”

It was “his” voice coming from the other side of the tree.

“I can hear you breathing,” he said, “so get over here and cut these off of me.”

She knew he thought she was the children. “It’s me.” They were the first words she’d addressed to him that weren’t hostile. “Are you tied down?”

He gave a grunt of pain. “Yeah. You?”

Olivia gave a few kicks, then rolled her body to the side, and the threads broke. She stood up and walked around to the far side of the tree.

Kit was sitting on the ground, untying his ankles from purple knitting yarn. As always, he was as naked as he could get without being arrested, and there was yarn hanging off all of him.

A bit of a laugh escaped Olivia.

He looked up at her in disgust. “I know. More ridicule of the worthless boy.”

Olivia held out her arms and multicolored threads hung down from them. “It’s a bat wing fringe. Think the style will catch on?” Threads were also on her dress and around her ankles.

At her joke, Kit leaned back on his hands and his face softened. “Looks like they got you too.”

Bending, she used her nails to loosen the knots in the yarn around his ankles. “How do you think those children did this without waking us?” She sat back on the ground a few feet away from him and began pulling threads off her clothes.

Kit was tugging at the pink yarn around his wrist and when he couldn’t loosen the knot, he held his arm out to Olivia. “Hovering spacecraft. I’d believe anything of those two. I have to put cracked corn around the blackberry vines to keep them out of there. Warning them that the thorns will make them bleed doesn’t do it.”

Olivia was trying to get the knot undone but it was too tight. She started to break the yarn, but Kit pulled his arm away. “You’ll hurt yourself.” When he broke it, there was a red mark on his wrist.

She was trying to pay no attention to being so close to his nearly naked body. “Why cracked corn?”

“To lure Old Thomas to guard the tunnel I made at the cost of a lot of my flesh.” He stood up.