A Death in Utopia Read Online Free PDF

didn't wait for an answer. Charlotte hurried off to take her charges to the school room and started listening to them recite their lesson for the day.
    In the hallway she saw Daniel Gallagher coming out of Mr. Ripley's office. "Are you going to write all of this up for your newspaper?" she asked rather more sharply than she meant to.
    "I'm going to try to find out the truth," he answered, frowning. "The man Mr. Platt saw must have been the fellow I met in Boston—Rory O'Connor his name was. He didn't look or talk like a killer. He's poor and ignorant. They may lock him up before he knows what's happening to him. I'm going to track him down and see what he has to say."
    "Why do you want to get mixed up in our troubles?" Charlotte was a little suspicious of how quickly Daniel Gallagher had taken on the job for himself.
    "This is my chance," Daniel explained eagerly. "No one will ever give me a newspaper job unless I prove I can find a spectacular story and write it up faster than anyone else." He looked defiant as he added, "These rich Harvard boys think they're the only ones who can be newspapermen, but I'll show them. Besides, I don't like the way they decided Rory was guilty before they even talked to him."
    Charlotte thought about her father and how quick people were to make accusations about people who looked shabby. Was that what Mr. Platt was doing? He didn't approve of Brook Farmers and all their radical ideas. He probably didn't approve of immigrants either, or anyone who looked like a tramp. She made up her mind to try to find the truth.
    "Well, I'm going to look around here and ask some questions too." she said impulsively and then wondered whether she should get involved with this young reporter. But it was too late to change her mind. "Maybe between us we can figure out what happened."
    Daniel looked at her uncertainly, but then he gave her quick, shy smile and said, "Perhaps we can work together. Stranger things have happened. At least we can try."
    Later, as she listened to the primary children recite their letters, she wondered what she could do to find out more about what happened to Winslow Hopewell. When Timothy Pretlove, who waslooking rather pale and sad, came to her desk to show a misshapen bird's nest he had found, she pushed it away.
    "Don't put that dirty thing on my desk, Timothy," she scolded him, and then was sorry she had said it when he looked at her wonderingly.
    "But look, the nest has two nests—one on top of the other." He carefully pulled aside some of the nesting material and showed her another nest below with some broken shells in it.
    "So it has. I've never seen one like that. How did you discover that?"
    "The nest fell down in the rain this morning. I took it into the barn and I just looked and looked until I found out why it was so funny looking. I've never seen a nest like this."
    Charlotte put the nest on a windowsill where the other children could see Timothy's unusual find. He'd given her an idea. Maybe she could discover something if she looked hard enough at the place Winslow Hopewell had been found. Wasn't that what Auguste Dupin did when he wanted to figure out how the two women in Mr. Poe's story were killed? No one had searched the blueberry patch looking for clues. Maybe there was something that would tell her Mr. Platt was wrong about the tramp.
    As soon as the lesson was over, she hurried back to her room to grab a shawl, and went over to the blueberry patch. As she got close to the spot where the body had been found, the ground was churned up with dozens of footprints overlapping one another. They went in all directions and covered the area except for an oblong of crushed grass where the body had been. No matter how hard she stared at the ground, Charlotte couldn't see anything that would tell her whathad happened. How did Winslow Hopewell fall? Was anyone with him?
    The late afternoon sun lit up the leaves of the maple trees, which were already red-tipped as autumn