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The Twisted Shadow
Edith Dorian
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
All persons in this story are entirely fictitious.
COPYRIGHT © 1956, BY EDITH DORIAN
DEDICATION
For Timothy Wallace Brown of Rutgers University whose roommates at last count included:
1 chicken snake
6 pine snakes
1 king snake
3 ribbon snakes
1 brown water snake
1 yellow-bellied water snake
1 coachwhip snake
1 southern banded snake
1 boa constrictor
6 chameleons
4 skinks
1 squirrel tree frog
1 narrow-mouthed toad
3 green tree toads
2 box turtles
1 gopher tortoise
2 Anderson tree frogs
1 marble salamander
1 alligator
1 scorpion
and
3 Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity brothers
1 • Don’t Treat on Me!
JUDY CARRINGTON DROVE THE STATION WAGON THROUGH the entrance into Gun Point National Park and patted the steering wheel triumphantly. Not even a leaf of the lilac hedge had brushed her fender.
“Just the same,” she told the station wagon, “if you weren’t so new and snooty-looking, I wouldn’t be afraid I’d get gray hair worrying about you.”
Thinking back, she only hoped she had looked a lot less surprised than she felt when she first saw the Sinnett Harbor Library after her train had pulled in from New York yesterday afternoon. Because her mental picture of a library in a small Maine town had definitely not included either a Colonial-style brick building with a handsome new wing almost ready for use or a bookmobile like this one.
A big, sprawling log cabin marked “Ranger Station” stood to the left of the road, and Judy glanced at it curiously. She had three books illustrated with pictures of unappetizing reptiles for somebody in that building. Besides, unless she wanted to find the cabins on her route by the eeny-meeny-miney-mo system, she needed a Park map. She might have been brought up on stories of Sinnett Harbor, but she had been there exactly twenty-four hours, and Gun Point National Park was new since her mother’s day anyway. In fact, as far as Judy could see, her mother would never recognize her home town.
Thirty years ago, before Grandfather Mariner died and Grandmother moved her family to Massachusetts, Sinnett Harbor had been a quiet fishing port, not a summer resort for writers and publishers. Now there was not much along Ship Street any of the Mariners would remember except the First Parish Church on the ancient Mall, and even that was flanked by new buildings like the post office, the town hall, and the library.
Shadows were capering over the shiny new paint of the station wagon, and Judy watched their antics with amusement as she hunted out the books for the Ranger Station. One of those shadows was fantastically appropriate. No matter how often it dissolved and reformed, it managed to resemble a gallows. Conditioned imagination, she decided, chuckling. That’s what came of driving on Gallows Road. By the time she’d done it regularly, twice a week for two months, she’d be likely to think she saw some luckless pirate, sitting on his coffin, jolting in a cart to execution on Gibbet Ridge!
Sliding the doors over the bookshelves again, she looked idly over her shoulder to see what was causing her macabre shadow. Then she nearly dropped the ranger’s reptiles in astonishment. Either termites did not eat gibbets or the town fathers had set up a replica of the original model to give tourists their money’s worth. Fascinated, Judy examined the plaque attached to its upright. It was the Sinnett Harbor gallows all right; at least, it was the last one ever used, thriftily moved to serve as a signpost to Gibbet Ridge. At least that eliminated one of the three forks in the road for her bookmobile route. She already knew who lived on the Ridge nowadays—Sinnett Harbor’s most famous native son, the Pulitzer Prize winner, Sandys Winter. She ought to know; she had written a term paper on his novels for her Contemporary American Literature course this spring.
Judy shook her head as she hurried across the road to the log cabin. She was beginning to feel sorry for the rangers. A life-sized gallows was not exactly a soul-satisfying summer view. She preferred her own of Pound o’ Tea Lighthouse and the open bay beyond the harbor breakwaters. But her sympathy for rangers was short-lived. Nobody answered her repeated bangs with the knocker, and she finally tramped back to the bookmobile minus the Park map she wanted.
“What’s the good of a ranger station without a ranger?” she muttered. “If those men think I’m leaving library books on a front porch that practically sits on a public road, they’re in for a shock.”
Disgustedly she dumped the books on the seat beside her and started off again. She supposed she could stop at the Station on the way back. Meanwhile, she might as well try the right-hand fork. It was closer.
That fork, however, seemed to be a total loss for a cabin hunter. It was not much more than a trail at best, and Judy began to wonder what road etiquette demanded if another car appeared from the opposite direction. Probably one of them backed all the way to its starting point to let the other through. But after she had stopped for the fourth time to give a white-tailed deer the right of way, she would have been less surprised to meet a war party of Penobscots padding along in moccasins than anything as blatantly civilized as another car. If there were people and cabins in the woods on either side of this narrow dirt track, those deer were mighty unconcerned about them. It was a pair of skunks, though, waddling placidly out of the bushes almost into the path of the bookmobile, that made Judy try another direction. Slamming on her brakes, she spotted a winding side road and hastily turned into that. She was not arguing with one skunk, let alone two. That fork had been getting her nowhere fast. If they wanted it, they could have it.
Nevertheless, before she had gone more than a quarter of a mile, she was thinking of those skunks with positive affection. From the sounds ahead of her, she must be nearly on top of a dozen families with five small boys apiece I But a boy chasing a ball was no more predictable than a skunk, and she crawled around the last curve at a safety-first ten miles an hour. This time she had no need to worry, however. There were plenty of boys—a whole pack of cub scouts on a camporee apparently—but they were
