A Stranger in the House [antikvár]

PROLOGUE a , 'i' ¦ f ¦ 1 1 1 . I I I- , Propelled by a pudgy hand, the red sedan laboured up the f f i, side of a pile of earth and then zoomed down and tumbled into a trough on the other side. 'Mummy, look! The car crashed. It came over the hill, and it fell down.' Anna Lange halted the gentle rocking motion of the porch swing with her feet and smiled at her son. 'You made it fall down, Paul.' The child beamed up at her, satisfied that she was paying attention. He wiped his dirty face with his equally dirty forearm and shook his head mischievously. 'Umh-Umh,' he told her. 'It just fell down.' Anna laughed in spite of herself at the picture he made, seated happily in the grass, his striped T-shirt and little blue shorts already smudged with dirt. Popeye winked and flexed a giant muscle from the crown of the sailor hat which her son was wearing. She had turned the brim down to jrotect Paul's face from the sun, so when he looked up at ler, he had to bend his head back to get a clear view out from under it. Anna noticed that his socks had ridden down and were already disappearing into the backs of his miniature kickers. Making a revving noise with his lips, Paul extricated the car from the ditch. 'Have to hurry up and go to work now,' he said. Waddling on bent legs, the child drove the car through the wooden gate of his play patch toward the sandpit, where a yellow steam shovel lay on its side. Paul abandoned the car outside the sandpit, clambered in, and plopped himself down beside the larger toy. He righted the steam shovel and carefully began to rotate the crank which lowered the scoop into the sand, all his attention now focused on his task. Sunshine glinted off the stray amber locks which curled around Paul's hatbrim as he bent his head to his mission.