The Wolf in Winter by John Connolly Read Free Book Online

Harry were the poor relatives, bound to Dianne and her husband by the shade of a father. They were content to play that role, though, and to keep the existence of Dianne and her husband hidden from the citizens of Prosperous. Unspoken between them was the fact that they might have need of Dianne at some point in the future, and not only for money, for the Dixons wanted nothing more than to leave Prosperous, and that would be no easy task. The board would want to know why. The board would investigate. The board would almost certainly find out about Dianne, and the board would wonder what secrets Erin Dixon might have shared with her half sister, the daughter of a man who had turned his back on the town, who had stolen its money and, perhaps, whispered of the deal it had made to secure itself.
    Keeping all their fears from Dianne and her husband wasn’t easy. To further complicate matters, Harry and Erin had asked that the money be paid in cash. She could still remember the look on Dianne’s face: puzzlement, followed by the dawning realization that something was very wrong here.
    “What kind of trouble are you two in?” Dianne asked them, as her husband poured the last of the wine and gave them the kind of disapproving look he probably reserved for patients who neglected to follow his postoperative advice and then seemed surprised when they started coughing blood. His name was Magnus Madsen, and he was of Danish extraction. He insisted on the pronunciation of his first name as “Mau-nus,” without sounding the “g,” and had resigned himself to correcting Harry’s literal pronunciation whenever they met. Harry just couldn’t seem to manage “Mau-nus,” though. That damned “g”kept intruding. Anyway, it wasn’t as if Magnus Madsen was fresh off a Viking longship. There were rocks that hadn’t been in Maine as long as the Madsens. His family had been given plenty of time to learn to speak English properly, and drop whatever airs they’d brought with them from the Old Country.
    “We’d just prefer it if people in Prosperous didn’t know that we were having serious difficulties,” said Harry. “It’s a small town, and if word got out it might affect my chances of bidding successfully for work. If you pay us in cash, then we can make pretty regular lodgments into our account until we find our feet again, and nobody will be any the wiser.”
    “But surely any dealings you have with your bank are entirely confidential,” said Magnus. “Couldn’t you ask your bank manager for an extended line of credit? I mean, you’re still working, and you must have paid off the bulk of your mortgage by now. That’s a nice house you have, and it’s worth a fair sum, even in these difficult times. It’s hardly like asking for an unsecured loan.”
    There was so much that Harry wanted to say at that point, but it could have been summarized as “You and I do not live in similar worlds.” Those words “unsecured loan” bit at him as well, because that was precisely what they were asking of Magnus and Dianne, but mostly he knew that Magnus had no conception of the way the town of Prosperous worked. If he did, it would turn his hair white.
    And, shortly after that, he’d be dead.
    Magnus and Dianne gave them the money in the end, and Harry used it to pump up the deposits being made at the bank, but the borrowed cash was almost gone now, and he didn’t think that his in-laws could be tapped again. In any normal situation, Harry and Erin would have sold up and moved on. Sure, they’d take a bit of a hit on the house, but with a little luck they might come out of it with a high five- or low six-figure sum once the mortgage was paid off. They could start again, maybe rent for a while until the economy recovered.
    But this wasn’t a normal situation. They knew that they probably weren’t the only ones in the town who were suffering; there were rumors, and more than rumors. Even Prosperous wasn’t entirely immune from