Foul Play at the Fair by Shelley Freydont Read Free Book Online

dressed in a robe and curlers, pushed her way past her son and daughter, who’d stopped in the doorway and were staring in openmouthed horror. “I can’t have a crime scene here. You’ll have the inspectors closing us down.” She stopped abruptly, obviously seeing the body for the first time.
    Her hand went to her mouth.
    “Don’t be sick,” Bill barked.
    She shook her head, her eyes bulging above her fingers.
    Donnie Waterbury moved his mother aside and stepped into the room. “Dad, what’s going on? What happened? Who is that?”
    Bill forced himself to stand a little straighter. The man needed backup—literally. “If you’ll all just go into the other room.”
    “Who is it, Mom?” Roseanne Waterbury’s cinnamon-red curls bobbed as she tried to see around her brother, Donnie. She saw the body, screamed, and began to cry.
    Bill grunted in exasperation, or pain, or both. “Amanda, please take Roseanne and Donnie back to the house. This is no place for them or you.”
    “But what happened? Who is it? What’s he doing in the apple press?”
    Liv felt a hysterical giggle rise to the surface. She pushed it back down. A man was dead. Joss had lost a brother, and Liv had to do something before it cast a pall over the festival. And she didn’t have a clue where to start.
    “Oh my God,” Bill groaned. “What are
you
doing here?”
    They all turned as Andy Miller rushed into the room. He was dressed for the fields but he stuttered to a stop when he saw the body, and his face turned whiter than the victim’s makeup.
    He shook his head as if waking from a bad dream. “I heard it on my police scanner. I thought if there was trouble, I could help. I never thought. Oh my God.” He dragged his John Deere cap off his head, revealing thinning corn-silk hair. “Oh my God. What on earth happened?”
    “That’s what I’m trying to ascertain,” Bill said, holding on to his patience. “So, if you really want to help, you can take all these folks up to the house. Maybe make some coffee.”
    “But—”
    “Now.”
    The sound of another arriving vehicle pulled Bill’s concentration.
    Bill’s eyes rolled to the back of his head. “And if that’s the crime scene van, tell ’em to park around back.”
    “Sure thing, Bill. Anything I can do.” Andy herded everyone toward the door, but Liv hung back, absently staring at the body while her mind reeled off the implications of the crime as she made contingency plans for directing tourists away from the farm store.
    “Ms. Montgomery? Liv?”
    “What?”
    “You really need to leave, too.”
    “Oh, of course, but…Bill, at the risk of sounding callous, I need to do something about this.”
    “You? Oh, you mean about the festival. Well, we can’t let people in here today. They’ll have to close.”
    “I realize that, but I don’t want to have people panicking when they learn that a murder has been committed.”
    Bill winced, but Liv wasn’t sure whether it was from pain or the idea of murder in his town. But she noticed he didn’t contradict her. Pete Waterbury had definitely been murdered.
    “It could have disastrous results for the festival and everyone who depends on it for their livelihood.” The rumor that a murder had been committed on the premises might cause a full-blown panic, keeping visitors away in droves. Not to mention what it would do to Waterbury Farms’s reputation. But if a murderer was still running loose, it could have tragic results.
    “I’ll have someone put up the chain across the entrance. There’s a Closed sign attached to the chain.”
    Liv had noticed the two short posts on either side of the entrance. The chain and sign would be good enough to keep out cars, but what the hell was she going to do to stop the speculation?
    She looked back at the body, trying to feel sad that a life had been lost, but mainly feeling angry that the Zoldoskys had brought this on the town.
    “Bill—”
    Several crime scene detectives came in. The