Blessed Is the Busybody by Emilie Richards Read Free Book Online Page A

tissue. “We ought to tell the police. I noticed holes in the victim’s ear and nose. This could be hers.”
    “You’re a perceptive woman,” said a voice behind us. A male voice. “Unfortunately, something tells me you’re also too nosy for your own good. And maybe for mine.”

    Ed and I like good wine, but we drink the cheap stuff. We like to pretend we’ve discovered secret stores of premium vintages, misbottled and sold for less than a sawbuck. It’s easier to imagine when we’ve had too many glasses, which rarely happens, since that’s expensive, too, in all sorts of ways.
    Tonight I poured both of us a second glass and suspected that even Ed’s Temperance Society foremothers would understand. It had been that kind of day.
    I rolled my glass back and forth in my hands and gazed at it as if I were performing some esoteric pagan rite. “You know when you took the girls over to the Frankels’ house?”
    “Uh huh.” We were cozied up together on the living room sofa, and he was finishing a book for Sunday’s sermon. Judging from the small print and the twenty-word title, I hoped he planned to insert a vocabulary list and definitions in the order of service.
    I stopped rolling and sipped before I went on. “Well, Lucy came to see what was going on.”
    “Lucy has a police radio in her kitchen?”
    “She didn’t need one today. The word was all over town.”
    “And she talked you into going with her to search the house across the street.”
    “Ed!” I knocked the book out of his hand. “Who told you?”
    “Who didn’t? I fielded phone calls all afternoon. People wanted to know what you were doing.”
    “Well, you could have asked me about it.”
    “I was just waiting to see how long it would take you to tell me. So what did you find?”
    I recapped briefly and ended with the bad news. “Unfortunately, we were caught red-handed.”
    “Roussos?”
    “The very one. He wasn’t happy. He claimed we probably destroyed evidence, but I don’t think the police would even have gone over if he hadn’t seen us. A dozen realtors could have trooped through before they got there. Now Roussos is that much further ahead.”
    “What makes you think so?”
    “Either Jennifer was killed in that house or at least she was there today before her body ended up on our doorstep.”
    “Does Roussos think so?”
    “You think he’d tell me?” I snuggled against him. “Every man I know keeps secrets. Like the one I’m married to. You never told me anything about that woman.”
    “There wasn’t anything to tell.” Ed put his arm around me. “She came in for counseling. Nothing she said can be repeated.”
    I debated whether to tell him about my conversation with Teddy and decided there was no point in keeping it a secret. “Teddy saw you fighting with Jennifer Marina in the church parking lot. She mimicked the whole conversation like a pro. It’s too bad vaudeville’s dead. We could have gotten our daughter a gig on the Orpheum circuit.”
    He saw through me. “Jennifer Marina was a troubled woman. She asked my advice and I gave it. She didn’t like what she heard.”
    I knew that was all I was going to get out of him. Jennifer might be dead, but Ed took his job seriously. Whatever secrets she’d had would die with her. I just hoped those same secrets hadn’t killed her.
    I sat up straight, because a terrible thing had just occurred to me. “Ed, did she tell you something somebody else wants to know? Are you in any danger?”
    “You’ve been watching The Sopranos, haven’t you?”
    “No, really. Look, if someone killed her for something she knew—”
    “We don’t know why she was killed.”
    “But they put her here, on our doorstep. On your doorstep. Maybe it was a warning. Keep your mouth shut, or you’ll be next.”
    “I’m not worried, Aggie, and you don’t need to worry, either. Nothing Jennifer told me would have gotten her killed. You’ll just have to trust me on that.” He picked up