Mallets Aforethought by Sarah Graves Read Free Book Online Page B

heavy hand. Close up it was easy to read the single word block-printed on it: GUILTY.
    The smoke smell got stronger. “You or your friend happen to put it there?” Colgate asked.
    I stared at him. “No, of course not. Why would we?”
    “Don’t know. That’s why I’m inquiring. Maybe for the same reason a nice woman like you turns out to know so much about an ugly thing like strychnine poisoning?”
    “Don’t be silly. Anyway,” I went on, flustered, “aren’t you supposed to leave the evidence where it is? For the crime scene people?”
    His gaze didn’t waver. “Not if it might not survive intact.”
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake, why wouldn’t it?” But as I asked this I heard a faint crackling sound and glanced back puzzledly at the derelict old building’s sagging clapboards.
    Smoke seeped from between them. “If things don’t go right, I might end up hauling those two bodies out, too,” Colgate went on.
    Harlequin House was on fire.
     
     
    In the old days, many of my clients believed the Big Three Myths: that they could run a hotel, operate a good restaurant, or manage a major league baseball team, given the opportunity.
    Thinking this, I blew out the candles on the dining room table and switched on the lamps, their glow reflecting softly in the old gold-medallion wallpaper. It was six in the evening and through the front windows I could see the blue-white blaze of the floodlights set up around Harlequin House, blocks away.
    “So what’d you tell him?” Wade asked. “When he asked how you knew so much about strychnine, I mean.”
    Dark figures moved in the lights, cars leaving and others arriving. An occasional brief siren-whoop pierced the night.
    “The truth,” I replied. “That Ellie and I have been involved in a couple of situations, before. And that I read a lot.”
    We two women had fallen accidentally into a reputation for nosiness where murder was concerned, and Ellie still regarded any snooping we did as merely a hobby. But I had a forensics text,
Practical Homicide Investigation,
on my bedside table.
    “He believed it?” Wade asked. Broad-shouldered, with brush-cut blond hair and eyes the pale grey of a fog bank at sea, my husband had the kind of quiet patience I’d heard of but never managed to possess for myself.
    “Seemed to.”
Nux vomica,
the South American plant: a few in the medical literature had survived. Basically the stuff cranked the nerve impulses to the muscles up into the red zone and stuck them there. Its victim suffocated or died of exhaustion.
    “The news people are here,” I said, drawing the curtains.
    Murder in Maine came in one of two flavors, mostly: guy vs. girl or two guys vs. a case of beer and a cheap handgun. But this was different, so the vans topped with satellite dishes lumbered dutifully up Shackford Street like elephants in a circus parade.
    “What’d they tell you?” I asked Wade. A fire danced in the fireplace, birch logs piled on andirons with front posts cast in the shapes of leaping porpoises.
    “That they think the body came up through the trapdoor from the cellar,” he said. “Just like Colgate figured.”
    The volunteer fire department had arrived within five minutes, put the fire out in ten. The crackling had been pigeons’ nests in the eaves, not yet the house itself, being consumed by flames.
    “And the medical examiner was on his way back to Augusta from a meeting in St. John, so he stopped by and took a peek,” Wade said.
    “And?” I crossed my mental fingers.
    “And they’d pin it down more at autopsy, but he thought Hector’d been dead between twenty-four and forty-eight hours.”
    “Anyone say anything more about that note in his pocket?”
    Wade’s usual target-shooting range was the favorite of many cops, so they’d hailed him in friendly fashion. But he shook his head.
    “Nope. Only other thing I overheard was, the fire probably started in the wiring.”
    Not that anyone would yet have done a careful