Cat With a Fiddle (9781101578902) by Lydia Adamson Read Free Book Online Page B

Summer yesterday had promised. I strode away from the house and then stopped twenty feet away to get my bearings.
    ***
    In the distance I could see the big barn—Will Gryder’s studio. I found the path I had taken that night with Beth, the night we’d found his body. Then I took the connecting path, which ran past the back of the studio and meandered into a wooded plot. Through the trees I could make out two small structures. These, I assumed, were the sheds I’d heard mentioned, and the creek must be just beyond. I picked up my pace, eager to leave the forbidding barn behind.
    Just as I reached the woods I heard, once again, a disembodied cello. I was not only enchanted by the beautiful sounds it was making, I was also confused—it couldn’t be Miranda again, not at this hour. It was much too early. I knew the piece well: Bach’s C Major Suite for Unaccompanied Cello. I had owned Casals’ recording of it for years, but then the record was lost in one of my many moves. It could have been a record I was hearing now. But where was it coming from?
    The studio? Was it possible the music was coming from Will’s studio? Yes! I stood listening for another minute. How macabre. I turned back and made for the barn. But I hesitated at the door, frightened to go in. Then, as suddenly as the music had begun, it stopped. I waited a few seconds longer, then opened the door and peered in. The studio was deserted. I stepped back outside and closed the door, thinking that the music would start again any minute. But it never came. There was nothing but country morning silence. Had the traffic accident shaken something loose in my brain? Would I keep hearing music wherever I went?
    I made my way through the woods, the frozen twigs snapping beneath my boots. I found the shed easily—two sheds, actually, within a few feet of each other—about fifty feet from a stream. It must have been a respectable stream once; the sides were steep enough, but now the near-frozen flow was minimal, pretty pathetic. Logs and chunks of metal stuck out of the creek bed, as if it had become a local dumping place.
    The sheds were like old-fashioned beach cabanas, made of wood and metal. A sliding door was at the front of each. They were only about ten feet deep but they were quite long, almost the size of Quonset huts.
    I slid open the door of the shed closest to the creek. It was musty and frigid inside. A central aisle, very narrow, led from one end of the structure to the other, and on either side of the aisle were trunks and cartons—a vast array of assorted junk, including old clothes tied into uneven bales.
    All of it had been left behind, intentionally or unintentionally, by the artists who’d resided at the colony over the years.
    At the very end of the aisle, I found a space where someone obviously had pushed some cartons away and heaved others onto a neighboring pile. This afforded only a small space, but there were two blankets on the floor, an old pillow tied at the ends, and two empty brandy bottles.
    Was this the place where, according to Miranda, Beth and Will had made love and then fought? It certainly could be. The bedding and the bottles seemed to hint at some kind of tryst.
    I had to wonder why they would meet here in this cramped, dirty, cold place. Why hadn’t they gone to any of the half-dozen motels in the Northampton area? Or even better, to one of the perfectly comfortable cabins right here on the grounds, where they could build a cozy fire in the wood-burning stove?
    I stared down at the blankets. Maybe, I thought, Will Gryder had been one of those men who love illicit sex . . . who get turned on by stolen sex accomplished at the wrong time in the wrong place for the wrong reason . . . sex as a kind of adventuring theft. There were men like that. Even my friend Tony Basillio would, on occasion, rather make love in a phone booth on the Jersey Turnpike that in a suite at