Maximum Security by Rose Connors Read Free Book Online Page B

didn’t remember that part. And Herb Rawlings was well into his sixties; his policy almost certainly issued more than three years ago. Folks in his tax bracket start their estate planning early. I look across the table at the Kydd, silently asking the question I think I’ve already answered.

    “You guessed it,” he says, tapping his pen against the issue date stamped on the policy’s first page. “Three years and a month.”

    It’s worse than I thought. A groan escapes me.

    “Damn,” Harry says, sipping his coffee. “I hate it when that happens.”

    “To the day,” the Kydd adds. “And that’s not all.” He pauses, reaches into the cardboard box and pulls out a square knot, Sticky Buns’s nautical version of the universal cinnamon roll. “It gets worse.”

    “Kydd,” I say, taking the last coffee from the tray, “I had precisely one strategy for this case. You just told me not only that it’s a failure, but that it actually hurts us, cuts the other way. How much worse can it get?”

    I regret the question even before I absorb the expression on his face.

    “Worse,” he repeats, flipping through Herb’s policy to yet another highlighted section. “In addition to the other benefits provided herein…”

    The Kydd interrupts his recitation, looks up at Harry and me to make sure we’re listening. We are.

    “…the Company agrees to pay twice the face amount of this policy if the insured has suffered loss of life as the direct result of bodily injury caused solely by accidental means.”

    A double-indemnity clause. I’m speechless.

    Harry lets out a low whistle.

    The Kydd sets the policy down, takes his glasses off again and tosses them on the desk. He leans back and examines his square knot before taking a huge bite. “The motive…” he says, pointing what’s left of his pastry at us.

    I consider telling him not to talk with his mouth full, but I bite my tongue instead.

    “…just doubled.”

     

    The Kydd and I turn onto Easy Street on schedule, at high noon. This morning’s fog has burned off and the mid-October sun is bright, but not quite warm. It glitters on the small waves lapping at the Rawlingses’ dock and turns the crushed oyster shells in their driveway an impossible, almost blinding white. Even the seagulls, busily dropping quahogs from the sky to the rocks below to crack their shells, look cleaner than usual. Sun-bleached feathered fishermen.

    It’s obvious Louisa Rawlings is expecting us. Her inside front door is open, the screens in the outer door admitting the autumn chill to her otherwise buttoned-up house. Three ears of Indian corn—one yellow, two rust-colored—hang from the shingles beside the front door. A large pumpkin—uncarved as yet—sits on the top step. These are new additions since yesterday. The grieving widow has done a bit of seasonal decorating.

    I cut the Thunderbird’s engine and grab my beat-up briefcase from the backseat, but the Kydd doesn’t reach for his. He doesn’t move at all. He seems frozen in the passenger seat, eyes wide as he takes in the Rawlings estate. “Hot damn,” he says, “what a spread.”

    “We’re in the high-rent district now,” I tell him. “So behave yourself.”

    He grins.

    “If you don’t, you’ll be exiled to the slums of South Chatham for life.”

    He laughs out loud.

    South Chatham is a quaint seaside village of antique shingled cottages, small professional offices, and family-run shops. It doesn’t feature the lavish landscape of its wealthy sister to the north, and it certainly doesn’t host an exclusive country club, but it’s not a slum by anyone’s standards. The Kydd lives there, in a rented cottage. And Harry does too, in a small apartment on the second floor of our office building. They both tell anyone who’ll listen that they’re slumming it down south.

    Louisa emerges from the house as the Kydd and I extricate ourselves and our briefcases from my old, tired Thunderbird. She