Unhinged by Sarah Graves Read Free Book Online Page A

and most of them are pretty harmless. But Wyatt’s groups are . . . different.”
    “Yeah,” Sam put in, coming in with some plates. “And most of us think the wrong group-member got himself drowned.”
    “Sam,” I reproved him. “He can hear you.”
    “No, he can’t. He drank most of one of Roy’s bottles and now he’s got his head down on the table, snoring.”
    Sam grinned, returning to the dining room where Harry Markle had apparently fallen in love with Prill. “Good dog,” I heard him telling the animal delightedly.
    She was, too. But two dogs were too many for my household. A few moments later Maggie repaired to the parlor where she began tuning her banjo. Soon she and Sam were singing their own version of an old Gordon Lightfoot tune:
    “They took a big ship on a terrible trip, it was cold, it was dark, it was scary . . .”
    “Anyway,” I went on as Maggie’s voice lilted. “Wyatt’s folks are always dressed in brand-new clothes that cost the earth, and driving too fast in their gas-guzzling SUVs.”
    “Which,” Ellie put in, checking the coffeemaker, “I don’t get. You’d think fuel economy would be tops on his hit-list.”
    “
. . . so I wrote down this song, it’s a million words long, and I used up the whole dic-tionary,
” Sam chimed in with Maggie.
    “Meanwhile, they’re all always shooting off their mouths in the stores and restaurants, about how fishing and logging and so on are ruining the environment,” I explained.
    Roy nodded, getting it. Fishing and logging and so on were how people made their livings around here, and they didn’t like know-it-all strangers—people from away, the locals called them—coming around telling them they ought to quit. Or worse, that they should be
made
to quit.
    “Wyatt’s fat-cat clients could dump arsenic in the water supply and he wouldn’t say boo, as long as they kept paying him,” George said, coming in to fetch cups and dessert plates.
    We were having a berry pudding with fresh whipped cream and coffee with a blackberry brandy that George had distilled three autumns earlier, after Ellie and I had picked the blackberries.
    George made a face. “‘You mean I can’t get today’s
New York Times
today?’ ” he mimicked Wyatt’s nature-watching customers.
    “Wyatt arranges the whole thing for his clients,” I told Roy. “Books the rooms, has the drinks and meals catered, plans the nature-watching, and gives lectures. On eagles, for instance.”
    Roy got dessert spoons from the silverware drawer without being asked to. I already thought that as a houseguest he was the cat’s pajamas, so easy to get along with, you’d have thought he’d been living here forever. And just before dinner when he took me aside to pay for his room, he’d ignored the sum I asked for when we made the arrangement.
    Instead he’d estimated what the same room would cost in Los Angeles and added thirty percent. “For the inconvenience,” he’d said charmingly.
    “Water’s deep in that marsh right after the snowmelt,” I went on. “And from what got reported in the
Tides,
it seems like one of the group got separated from the rest.”
    Ellie took up the story. “By the time they thought to look for the poor man he’d been missing for a couple of hours.”
    Sam and Maggie harmonized, “. . .
the water was deep and the waves they were steep; the captain and crew started drinking . . .
”
    “They found him in the marsh?” Roy McCall’s face was still.
    I nodded, getting out the electric mixer. “They think maybe he slipped, stepped in a hole where the water was over his head. And at this time of year that water’s cold.”
    “. . . but booze on the lake is an awful mistake and especially when you are sinking!”
    “Brr.” McCall shivered. A moment of silence:
sinking!
    “Hey, Mom?” Sam came in as I finished whipping the cream. “Maggie and I are going to skip dessert. She wants to take the boat out, see if she can navigate by the