A Crafty Killing Read Online Free PDF Page A

slid into the lock, which clicked as she turned it. For a moment she was afraid to enter. A Chad she no longer knew had lived behind the door. Not that they hadn’t communicated. In fact, their conversations had improved from barely civil to quite friendly during the months they had lived apart before his death. There’d be no unfriendly ghost inside, she chided herself, and opened the door.
    The darkness inside was complete, the feeble light from the loft doing little to illuminate the gloom. Katie groped along the edge of the doorjamb, found and flipped on the light switch. A bare bulb overhead flared to life, barely illuminating the tiny room.
    Chad’s coffee-table art books filled shelves lining the walls of the tiny room, which couldn’t have measured more than eight by ten feet. In front of them were stacks of Chad’s unsold, unframed paintings—priced and ready to sell—ones he said he didn’t love. She’d kept seven or eight of his favorites, but had taken them off her walls after Chad’s death. Maybe it was time to hang them again.
    A cot, neatly made up, filled the nearest corner with a small pine nightstand and pottery lamp beside it. A sagging upholstered chair and floor lamp were the only other furniture. A small oriental-patterned scatter rug beside the bed was one of the few cheerful accents. An easel at the end of the bed held an unfinished canvas of lovely cosmos swaying in a breeze—one of Katie’s favorite flowers. Chad’s artist’s palette was clean, as was the brush that sat on the top of the shelf.
    Katie’s throat constricted. Everything must have been as he’d left it more than six months before. She wrinkled her nose at the dry, stuffy air. Chad had left their homey, comfortable apartment for this horrible, barren little room?
    A wide-striped Hudson Bay blanket, serving as a bedspread, lay wrinkled where someone had sat on it. Ezra? Had he come here to mourn Chad?
    She stepped inside and noticed a book—she could tell it was a journal—lying on the cot’s pillow, just daring her to open it. A box hidden in the back of her closet held the journals Chad had kept since his teen years. She’d respected his privacy and had never opened one of them—not even after his death.
    Katie approached the bed. “I’m not afraid of anything it might say,” she told herself, her words sounding hollow in that morbid little room.
    She picked up the journal. It was nothing special. No tooled leather cover, just a cheap book of lined paper. Something Chad had probably bought at the McKinlay Mill Dollar Store. Katie flipped though the pages and recognized the cursive script that was indeed his handwriting.
    Along with jotting down his thoughts and feelings, Chad had used the journal as a place to sketch ideas for future paintings. One of them was of a large pansy. He’d even filled in the petals and leaves with colored pencil. It was pretty. A note jotted just under it said, I’ll paint it for Katie. Maybe when I give it to her, she’ll take me back.
    Katie frowned. She’d never seen the finished painting. It wasn’t among those canvases stacked on the floor of this tiny room. Maybe he’d changed his mind about finishing it.
    The breath caught in her throat as she read a sentence for the next day’s entry. I dreamed of Katie again last night.
    She slammed the pages shut, all the heartache from their months of separation—and then the loss at his death—welling up within her again.
    Then again, maybe she wasn’t ready to confront Chad’s innermost feelings at their separation. Still, she couldn’t leave the journal there. Chad’s body might be buried in the McKinlay Mill Cemetery, but the unassuming book contained at least a small piece of his soul.
    Journal in hand, Katie closed and locked the door to the little room and headed back to Ezra’s shabby, littered office. Setting the book on the desk, she slumped back into Ezra’s grungy office chair, staring out the window to the parking