Rest In Pieces by Rita Mae Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

by the rain a good half-mile away from shelter.
    By the time he dried off, the sky was obsidian with flashes of pinkish-yellow lightning, an unusual fall thunderstorm. As he went into the kitchen to heat some soup, a deafening crack and blinding pink light knocked him back a foot. When he recovered he saw smoke coming out of the transformer box on the pole next to his house. The bolt had squarely hit the transformer. Electric crackles continued for a few moments and then died away.
    Blair kept rubbing his eyes. They burned. The house was now black and he hadn’t any candles. There was so much to do to settle in that he hadn’t gotten around to buying candles or a lantern yet, much less furniture.
    He thought about going over to Harry’s but decided against it, because he was afraid he’d look like a wuss.
    As he stared out his kitchen window another terrifying bolt of lightning hurtled toward the ground and struck a tree halfway between his house and the graveyard. For a brief moment he thought he saw a lone figure standing in the cemetery. Then the darkness again enshrouded everything and the wind howled like Satan.
    Blair shivered, then laughed at himself. His stinging eyes were playing tricks on him. What was a thunderstorm but part of Nature’s brass and percussion?
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    7
    Tree limbs lay on the meadows like arms and legs torn from their sockets. As Harry prowled her fence lines she could smell the sap mixed in with the soggy earth odor. She hadn’t time to inspect the fifty acres in hardwoods. She figured whole trees might have been uprooted, for as she had lain awake last night, mesmerized by the violence of the storm, she could hear, off in the distance like a moaning, the searing cracks and crashes of trees falling to their deaths. The good news was that no trees around the house had been uprooted and the barn and outbuildings remained intact.
    “I hate getting wet,” Mrs. Murphy complained, pulling her paws high up in the air and shaking them every few steps.
    “Go back to the house then, fussbudget.” This exaggerated fastidiousness of Mrs. Murphy’s amused and irritated Tucker. There was nothing like a joyous splash in the creek, a romp in the mud, or if she was really lucky, a roll in something quite dead, to lift Tucker’s corgi spirits. And as she was low to the ground, she felt justified in getting dirty. It would be different if she were a Great Dane. Many things would be different if she were a Great Dane. For one thing, she could just ignore Mrs. Murphy with magisterial dignity. As it was, trying to ignore Mrs. Murphy meant the cat would tiptoe around and whack her on the ears. Wouldn’t it be fun to see Mrs. Murphy try that if she were a Great Dane?
    “What if something important happens? I can’t leave.” Mrs. Murphy shook mud off her paw and onto Harry’s pants leg. “Anyway, three sets of eyes are better than one.”
    “Jesus H. Christ on a raft.”
    The dog and cat stopped and looked in the direction of Harry’s gaze. The creek between her farm and Foxden had jumped its banks, sweeping everything before it. Mud, grass, tree limbs, and an old tire that must have washed down from Yellow Mountain had crashed into the trees lining the banks. Some debris had become entangled; the rest was shooting downstream at a frightening rate of speed. Mrs. Murphy’s eyes widened. The roar of the water scared her.
    As Harry started toward the creek she sank up to her ankle in trappy ground. Thinking the better of it, she backed off.
    The leaden sky overhead offered no hope of relief. Cursing, her foot cold and wet, Harry squished back to the barn. She thought of her mother, who used to say that we all live in a perpetual state of renewal. “You must realize there is renewal in destruction, too, Harry,” she would say.
    As a child Harry couldn’t figure out what her mother was talking about. Grace Hepworth Minor was the town librarian, so Harry used to chalk it up to Mom’s reading too many