Harriett by Rebecca King Read Free Book Online

For once she
forgot her manners and lost her patience with the clairvoyant. “We
don’t know that she died of natural causes. She seemed to have been
perfectly fine all evening. Why now? Why has she suddenly keeled
over?” She lifted a cautionary finger when Madame Humphries took a
breath to reply. “If you say that the spirits told us, then I am
afraid that I am going to have to throw you out of
here.”
    Madame
lapsed into disgruntled silence. She was nothing if not intuitive
and had finally picked up on the growing unease within the
room.
    “ I cannot ever remember seeing anyone die of natural causes
like this. I mean, if she had a heart seizure or something, she
would have clutched her chest, not her throat,” Mr Bentwhistle
muttered as he studied the body beneath the blanket almost
clinically.
    “ Please? Do we have to discuss this right now?” Constance
gasped. Unable to ignore the shaking in her knees for a moment
longer, she slumped into the nearest chair and turned her gaze away
from the disturbing sight of Minerva’s body lying in the middle of
the rug.
    While
none of them put voice to the fact, they had indeed had a warning
of a death in Tipton Hollow, but could it be a spiritual warning?
Or was there a murderer in their midst?
    Harriett
moved closer to the fire and was grateful for its meagre warmth.
She tried not to stare, she really did, but she found herself
studying each occupant of the room individually. They all looked
just as shaken as she was, but could one of them be responsible for
the cold-blooded death of the woman at their feet? She swallowed
and turned away.
    While
the minutes ticked by she gave herself a stern lecture. There was
nothing to say that Minerva’s death hadn’t been of natural causes.
It was very important that she not let the tension, nervousness and
discomfort generated by the séance cloud her judgement and her
thinking.
    It
seemed an indeterminable age before Mr Montague returned. His face
was florid and he panted from the speed he had run to the
constable’s house, but he waved his hand at the sherry Harriett
held out to him.
    “ I won’t, if you don’t mind Harriett.” It wasn’t lost to him
that Minerva had been drinking sherry before she had died. Not that
he thought Harriett was involved in anything underhand, but he had
rather gone off sherry now. “I couldn’t find the constable, but
Charles has gone to the Constabulary in Great Tipton to fetch
someone,” he gasped and took a seat before the fire. “It’s awful
weather out there tonight. I don’t relish anyone having to journey
out in that.”
    “ Do you think she drank the sherry and it went down the wrong
way?” Eloisa asked with a frown. So far this evening she had been
relatively quiet, but she was clearly observant and had been
watching events unfold with a keen eye.
    “ I have had things go down the wrong way several times, as I
am sure that we all have, but I have never choked like that,”
Tuppence replied in confusion.
    “ What do we do now?” Beatrice asked nervously. She hated the
thought of having to walk home alone, especially after the message
warning them to be afraid of the dark, but she didn’t relish the
thought of having to stay in Harriett’s house for too much longer.
Her gaze turned toward Harriett, and she felt a pang of sympathy
for her friend. She had considered her life-long friend to have
been very brave to allow Tipton Hollow’s first Psychic Circle to be
held in her home. How she was coping now with a death in her very
own parlour, heaven only knew. Beatrice mentally winced at that and
quickly turned her thoughts toward the village constable. With any
luck, he shouldn’t be too much longer. After all, Tipton Hollow was
a fairly small village where nothing much happened. After his
nightly rounds, he would almost certainly go home with the intent
of retiring to bed. Once he got home, he would receive the message
and make his way over to Harriett’s house, inspect the