The Cradle Will Fall by Mary Higgins Clark Read Free Book Online Page B

you eat
    something." Molly's voice was gentle.

     
    Wearily Chris brushed a hand over burning eyes. "I'll have
    something, Molly," he said. "But I'll have to leave pretty quickly.
    The funeral director is coming to the house for Vangie's clothes."

     
    "When is the funeral?" Bill asked.

     
    "The coffin will be flown to Minneapolis tomorrow afternoon,
    and the service will be the next day." The words hammered in his
    ears. Coffin. Funeral. Oh, Vangie, he thought, I wanted to be free
    of you, but I didn't want you to die.

     
    At eight he went back to his house. At eight thirty, when the
    funeral director came, he had a suitcase ready with underwear
    and the flowing caftan Vangie's parents had sent her for Christmas.

     
    The funeral director was quietly sympathetic. He requested
    the necessary information quickly. Born April 15. He jotted down
    the year. Died February 15—just two months short of her thirty-
    first birthday, he commented.

     
    Chris rubbed the ache between his eyes. Something was wrong.

     
    "No," he said. "Today's the sixteenth, not the fifteenth."

     
    "The death certificate clearly states that Mrs. Lewis died be

     

     
    tween eight and ten last night, February fifteenth," the man said.

     
    "You're thinking the sixteenth because you found her this morn

     

     
     
    ing. But the medical examiner pinpointed the time of death."

     
    Chris stared at him. Waves of shock swept over him. He had
    been home at midnight and the car and Vangie's purse had been
    here. He'd assumed that Vangie had come in and killed herself
    sometime after he drove back to New York.

     
    But at midnight she'd been dead two to four hours. That meant
    that after he'd left, someone had brought her body here, put it
    on the bed and laid the empty glass beside it. Someone had wanted
    to make it seem that Vangie had committed suicide.

     
    "Oh, Lord," Chris whispered. At the last moment Vangie must
    have known. Someone had forced that poison into her, viciously
    killed her and the baby she was carrying.

     
    He had to tell the police. And there was one person they would
    inevitably accuse. As the funeral director stared at him, Chris
    said aloud, "They're going to blame it on me."

     
    DR. HIGHLEY hung up the phone slowly. Katie DeMaio suspected
    nothing. Her office apparently wanted nothing more of
    him than to discuss Vangie Lewis' emotional state. Unless, of
    course, someone had questioned Vangie's apparent suicide, perhaps
    raised the possibility that her body had been moved. The
    danger was still great.

     
    He was in the library of the Westlake home—his home now.
    The house was a manorlike Tudor with archways, marble fireplaces
    and Tiffany stained-glass windows. The Westlake house. The
    Westlake Hospital. The Westlake Maternity Concept. The name
    had given him immediate entree, socially and professionally.
    Marrying Winifred Westlake and coming to America to carry on
    her father's work had been a perfect excuse for leaving England.
    No one, including Winifred, knew about the years before Liverpool,
    the years at Christ Hospital in Devon.

     
    Toward the end she had started to ask questions.

     
    It was nearly eleven o'clock and he hadn't had dinner yet.
    Knowing what he was going to do to Edna had robbed him of the
    desire to eat. But now that it was over, he craved food. He went
    into the kitchen. Hilda had left dinner for him in the microwave
    oven—a Cornish hen with wild rice. He just needed to heat it up.

     
     
    Because he needed the freedom of the house, the privacy of
    his library, he'd gotten rid of Winifred's live-in housekeeper. She
    had looked at him with sour, sullen eyes, swollen with weeping.
    "Miss Winifred was almost never sick until. . ." She was going to
    say "until she married you," but she didn't finish.

     
    Winifred's cousin resented him too. He had tried to make
    trouble after Winifred's death, but couldn't prove anything. They'd
    dismissed the cousin as a disgruntled