A Bone to Pick Read Online Free PDF Page A

pretzels and then half a quart of chocolate fudge ripple ice cream.
Heiresses can do anything.
It was raining the next morning, a short summer shower that promised a steamy afternoon. The thunderclaps were sharp and scary, and I found my- self jumping at each one as I drank my coffee. After I retrieved the paper (only a little wet) from the other- wise unused front doorstep that faced Parson Road, it began to slow down. By the time I’d had my shower and was dressed and ready for my appointment with Bubba Sewell, the sun had come out and mist began to rise from the puddles in the parking lot beyond the patio. I watched CNN for a while—heiresses need to be well informed—fidgeted with my makeup, ate a banana, and scrubbed the kitchen sink, and then fi- nally it was time to go.
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    ~ Charlaine Harris ~
I couldn’t figure out why I was so excited. The money wasn’t going to be piled in the middle of the floor. I’d have to wait roughly two months to actually be able to spend it, Sewell had said. I’d been in Jane’s little house before, and there was nothing so special about it.
Of course, now I owned it. I’d never owned some- thing that big before.
I was independent of my mother, too. I could’ve made it by myself on my librarian’s salary, though it would have been hard, but having the resident man- ager’s job and therefore a free place to live and a little extra salary had certainly made a big difference. I’d woken several times during the night and thought about living in Jane’s house. My house. Or after probate I could sell it and buy elsewhere. That morning, starting up my car to drive to Honor Street, the world was so full of possibilities it was just plain terrifying, in a happy roller-coaster way. Jane’s house was in one of the older residential neighborhoods. The streets were named for virtues. One reached Honor by way of Faith. Honor was a dead end, and Jane’s house was the second from the corner on the right side. The houses in this neighbor- hood tended to be small—two or three bedrooms— with meticulously kept little yards dominated by large ~ 30 ~
    ~ A Bone to Pick ~
trees circled with flower beds. Jane’s front yard was half filled by a live oak on the right side that shaded the bay window in the living room. The driveway ran in on the left, and there was a deep single-car carport attached to the house. A door in the rear of the car- port told me there was some kind of storage room there. The kitchen door opened onto the carport, or you could (as I’d done as a visitor) park in the drive- way and take the curving sidewalk to the front door. The house was white, like all the others on the street, and there were azalea bushes planted all around the foundation; it would be lovely in spring. The marigolds Jane had planted around her mail- box had died from lack of water, I saw as I got out of the car. Somehow that little detail sobered me up completely. The hands that had planted those with- ered yellow flowers were now six feet underground and idle forever.
I was a bit early, so I took the time to look around at my new neighborhood. The corner house, to the right of Jane’s as I faced it, had beautiful big climbing rosebushes around the front porch. The one to the left had had a lot added on, so that the original simple lines of the house were obscured. It had been bricked in, a garage with an apartment on top had been con- nected to the house by a roofed walk, a deck had been ~ 31 ~
    ~ Charlaine Harris ~
tacked on the back. The result was not happy. The last house on the street was next to that, and I re- membered that the newspaper editor, Macon Turner, who had once dated my mother, lived there. The house directly across the street from Jane’s, a pretty little house with canary yellow shutters, had a realtor’s sign up with a big red sold slapped across it. The cor- ner house on that side of the street was the one Melanie Clark, another member of the defunct Real Murders club,