Nail Biter by Sarah Graves Read Free Book Online

features, disgruntled even in death, and the clothes could've been anyone's: old jeans, gray long-sleeved undershirt, and over that a flannel shirt so faded it was impossible to tell what color it had been.
    But there was something about those lips, so thick and blubbery looking . . . then I had it. “I do know this guy,” I said.
    “Yeah, great,” Jenna said carelessly. “I'm going back in the house.”
    “But . . . hey, wait. What're we going to do now?” I thought that as an ex-cop she might at least have a clue about a standard operating procedure for a corpse plus no phone.
    And she did, but it wasn't one I liked. “Watch our backs, for one thing,” she replied. “Unless you'd like to try driving in this. I wouldn't.”
    She waved at the windows, still deluged by rain. Outside them raged a storm so nasty that all the animals on the island were probably lining up two by two, waiting for the ark.
    “What do you mean?” I asked her. “Why should we have to be worried?”
    But she didn't answer, instead returning to inspect the body again. “Who is he, anyway?”
    “Eugene Dibble. Kind of a jerk,” I told her, though there was more to him than that. Among other things, he'd been a bully and a self-styled preacher of fire and brimstone.
    These latter materials always being aimed at others, of course. But there was no sense speaking ill of the dead in front of Jenna, who hadn't even known him. “Sad story,” I added.
    No real church would go near him but he had a small, ragged following of hard-luck cases. The point of his sermons—often delivered on street corners with firepower provided by beer—usually being that all their troubles were the fault of someone else.
    “Poor dope,” I said, remembering how angry Eugene's hate-spewing mouth had made me. But it was his hands that interested me now, and the area around them.
    Because speaking of things being somebody else's fault . . . “Help me a minute, here, will you?” I bent over the body again.
    My first thought had been that he'd come in here thinking the house was unoccupied, and shot himself. From what I'd heard he'd had plenty of reasons: chronic pain from an old work injury, no money, and a wife who treated him like something she'd like to have scraped off her shoe, for starters.
    But if he'd done that, there should have been a gun. And as Jenna had seen—and already understood, I now realized—there wasn't one.
    “It's not going to be here,” she said as we lifted Eugene's shoulders.
    My earlier qualms about disturbing a fresh crime scene had vanished; hey, we'd already moved him once. And at the moment I was a lot less worried about the cops being mad at me than I was about how Eugene's body had gotten into the shed in the first place.
    Specifically I wanted to be reassured that Eugene really had put it there himself. Versus for instance someone else having done it, as Jenna had implied; someone who might still be around.
    After all, if Eugene had found his way in here, anyone could do the same . . .
    “People who shoot themselves don't fall on the weapon very often. For one thing they usually sit down first,” Jenna remarked as we hauled on him.
    Criminy, he was heavy. But we got him rolled over and as she predicted no gun was underneath him. I aimed the flash all around just to be sure.
    “Nope. No sign of it.”
    So: someone else. I said the next thing that came into my head. “Where was everyone before I got here? Earlier today, I mean.”
    She thought about it. “Well, we were all here first thing in the morning, of course. The others were going out before lunch, I think. But I left before they did, for a bike ride when it first started to look as if the sun might come out.”
    She paused thoughtfully. “Then I came back here, had my own lunch, and took the boat out. I was on the water, saw the clouds come up again, and got in just as things were getting rough.”
    My boat, she meant. When Ellie and I bought the house, Sam bought