Spirit by Graham Masterton Page B

bright as can be.’
    â€˜Bronco said that I might meet her in Havana,’ said Elizabeth.
    Granpa frowned at father. ‘What’s the child talking about, Havana?’
    Father gave an uncomfortable smirk. ‘Bronco – that’s Johnson Ward, the writer. You remember
Bitter Fruit?
’
    â€˜Darn dirty book, from what I recall,’ said granpa.
    â€˜Go on, girls, run along now,’ father urged them. ‘Granpa and I have things to talk over.’
    So it was that they dressed in their coats and their woolly hats and their gloves and their extra socks and their big wobbly-sounding black rubbers and let themselves out of the kitchen door, into the snow. Ampersand the cat glared at them in suppressed fury as the freezing draught ruffled his fur.
    Laura carried a Macy’s shopping bag, one of the bags in which they had taken home their funeral clothes, slung around her neck like a backpack. They marched around to the tennis court, singing Winnie-the-Pooh’s cold toes song. The wind had suddenly dropped, and it had stopped snowing, although the sky was as grey as a Barre granite gravestone. The silence was huge. Elizabeth felt that if she screamed at the top of her voice, she could have been heard in Quaker Hill.
    They traipsed to the very centre of the tennis court. Elizabeth looked around. ‘This’ll do,’ she decided. They began scraping up snow with their gloved hands. Then Laura discovered the nursery slate which father had requisitioned last summer for chalking up his tennis scores, and she used it as a makeshift shovel.
    Elizabeth said, ‘It must be exactly the same size as Peggy, and it must look like her. Otherwise God won’t know it’s her, will He?’
    â€˜God’s supposed to know everything,’ Laura retorted. Her cheeks were fiery red and there was a bright drip on the end of her nose.
    â€˜I know He’s supposed to, but He must have so many different things to worry about. You know, like the weather, and the Russians.’
    It took them almost a half-hour to create the snow-angel. Elizabeth knew it was the right height because Peggy had come up to the second button on her coat; and so did this snow-angel. Laura rummaged in the Macy’s bag and produced Peggy’s brown beret and Peggy’s bright red kilt and Peggy’s brown tweed Saturday coat, all of which she had borrowed from Peggy’s closet. They dressed the snow-angel and then they stood back to admire her.
    â€˜Her face is too white,’ said Laura. ‘And she doesn’t have any hair.’
    â€˜Statues always have white faces,’ Elizabeth told her. ‘All the statues in the graveyard had white faces.’
    â€˜She’d look much better with a pink face, and hair,’ said Laura.
    â€˜Well . . . let’s go look in the shed.’
    They walked back across the garden, and tugged open the door of the spidery, spooky shed, and ventured inside. It was so dark now that they could scarcely see anything, only the faintest of snow reflections shining through the spider webs. They groped around, giggling. In one corner, Laura found an old canvas bag, which had once been used to wrap up the roots of a cherry sapling. They also found some soft, oily cotton, which the gardener had used for cleaning the lawnmower.
    â€˜This’ll do, this’ll do,’ Elizabeth hissed.
    Singing, ‘
how cold my toes, tiddely-pom
’ in an off-key, falsetto duet, they returned to the tennis court. Elizabeth took off the snow angel’s beret and carefully fitted the canvas bag over her head. Then Laura arranged the fluffy cotton on top; and Elizabeth replaced the beret.
Now
their snow-angel looked more realistic.
    â€˜What about eyes?’ frowned Laura.
    â€˜We could sew buttons on.’
    â€˜It’s too cold for sewing. We could use stones.’
    â€˜I have a better idea,’ said Elizabeth. ‘We could heat up the poker in the