Mallets Aforethought by Sarah Graves Read Free Book Online

was an overgrown thicket of sumac, barberry bushes, and wild raspberry. A small forest of whippy, resilient softwood saplings grew around the rear of the structure.
    “Nice new step,” he remarked, glancing down at my handiwork as we went in.
    “Thanks.” I couldn’t resist bouncing on it a little. Solid, definitely solid. But it was the only thing so far about the whole morning that felt that way. And although I had my hopes because Colgate seemed like a serious and solid Maine State Trooper, I still suspected matters would get worse.
    Inside, the smell was a mixture of old varnish and dry rot. A wide stairway curved up to the second floor, a carved mahogany banister turning with old-fashioned gracefulness at the landing.
    “Quite a place,” Colgate commented, peering around.
    I led him into the parlor. “There,” I said.
    He aimed the flash, went in where the bodies were. I stayed out. Somehow in my mind the skeletal tree branches outside had gotten mixed up with Eva Thane’s withered arms; I didn’t want to see her again. Or Hector either, his body still taut with the agony of his last moments.
    “Uh-huh,” Colgate said emotionlessly from inside the little room. Then: “You’re Wade Sorenson’s wife, aren’t you?”
    “Yes.” When there was freighter traffic, Wade guided the big vessels in and out of the local waters; the rest of the time he sold and repaired guns, both collectibles and utility weapons. So between boats and firearms, almost everyone around here knew him.
    “Quite the shooter.”
    Wade, he meant. It was how I’d gotten to know Wade, too; on the target range. “You poke around in here?” Colgate asked.
    The question snapped me out of a pleasant memory. “Enough to see them. That’s all. My friend knows who the old one is, though, or thinks she does.”
    “Really.” He came back out again. “How’s that?”
    “Her uncle owned the place, back in the early 1920s.”
    Chester Harlequin,
bon vivant
and disgraced local physician, had given the house and himself a bad name that lasted to this day. “Ellie has photographs of him and the other people who lived here, and she recognized that headpiece. The tiara.”
    “Right. And the other one is Hector Gosling?”
    He glanced casually around some more as he asked, taking in the broken plaster, cracked windowpanes, a patch of the ceiling fallen to the floor and shattered. But his tone wasn’t casual.
    “Yes. Everyone knew Hector,” I said. “No one liked him.”
    Might as well get that right out there; plenty of suspects. Just because George hated Hector for a reason, that didn’t mean someone else couldn’t have killed him for some
other
reason.
    “Anybody around here dislike him particularly?”
    Drat. I hesitated a beat too long and felt him hear it. Being a cop would’ve given him ears like a bat, especially for a lie. “My friend’s husband had a beef with him,” I replied.
    I explained it briefly. “But,” I finished, “George couldn’t have done it. You really need to look for somebody else.”
    “Okay,” Colgate said. He’d stopped smiling but he hadn’t locked up behind a thousand-mile stare. And maybe it was better he heard it right away, not wonder later why I hadn’t told him.
    “Just a sec,” he said. “I want to check one more thing.”
    He went back into the little room and emerged a few moments later with a clear plastic bag in his latex-gloved hand. Inside the bag was a scrap of paper with some writing on it.
    “Well?” I couldn’t read what it said.
    He was frowning, thoughtful. “Well, what?”
    And obviously he wasn’t going to tell me. “Can you at least reveal whether or not you happened to find the gun?”
    “You spotted that, did you? Single gunshot to the head on the female deceased.” He looked shrewdly at me and stripped the glove off. “No, I didn’t find it. But here’s some good news. Just one door.” He waved at it. “But it’s not a locked-room mystery anymore.”
    The