A Pinchbeck Bride Read Online Free PDF Page A

for this violation of condominium rules. “Thou shall not barbecue,” he was laughing. “And shellfish to boot.” He came from a family of Puerto Rican Jews.
    Miriam was the reason we could afford this costly address. She had inherited what was an immense unit from a cousin who’d bought the condominium as an investment—and then subdivided it, offering us the resulting small unit for a flagrantly generous price. It was a reward, literally, for our saving her daughter, Chloe, from a psychotic who’d seized her in an inheritance scheme on Cape Cod.
    Chloe, now a precocious student at a Back Bay girls’ school, had smelled the mesquite charcoal and came running onto her balcony, adjoining ours. “Mother alert, Mother alert! The Mothership will return in twenty minutes.”
    “The shrimp are almost done.” Roberto prodded them with a fork. “Where is she?”
    “She went to buy freshwater pearls. She’s making a bracelet to donate to the Channel 2 auction.”
    That was our local PBS fundraiser. “Isn’t she a little late? Hasn’t that already started?”
    “Yeah, she’s having a cow. The pearls came late because some parasite was croaking all the mussels on the farm…” She paused to chew another gummy worm. “Hey, how about that weird murder? With that girl dressed up like she was dating Sherlock Holmes. Mark, didn’t that happen where you work on the board of trustees?”
    I tried not to blanch but was sure Chloe had seen me; she didn’t miss much. No one but Roberto knew I’d found Genevieve Courson’s body. The police had withheld that from the media.
    Roberto removed the shrimp from the grill, doused the charcoal with water meant for our impatiens, and sprayed the air with a citrus-scented freshener that did nothing to disguise his cloud of gourmet smog.
    “How about we forget about it? All of us. We’ve had trouble enough without looking for more.” He gave me a look that could have grilled me too.

Chapter Seven
    But, somehow, I wanted to commemorate the young woman I knew, rescue her, in my mind, from the lurid screenplay the media were fabricating. I wanted to attend any funeral or memorial service scheduled. So I stopped by Shawmut College, which occupied a series of brownstones not unlike Mingo House itself, but much altered. Television crews from Channel 7 and Fox News had parked their trucks in the neighborhood, and I recognized Marcia Haight, one of Boston’s star anchors, interviewing a group of young people outside a fraternity. My goal, luckily, was in the other direction.
    The college registrar’s office retained vestiges of its origins as a private men’s club: egg-and-dart molding, mosaic lions on the floor. The counter was manned by a plump woman with the kind of baby-soft skin that doesn’t wrinkle with age.
    “I’m trying to find out about the funeral plans for one of your students, a young woman I knew, Genevieve Courson.”
    “Are you from the media?”
    “No.”
    “Show me your credentials.”
    “I’m not a reporter. I volunteer at Mingo House. Genevieve…was such a great person. She had an internship there, as a docent. We spent quite a bit of time together. She was a remarkable person.”
    The woman’s expression softened instantaneously. “Oh, what a shock. What a crime. So senseless.”
    At first she hesitated to speak, checking the room to make sure her colleagues weren’t listening. “She was always so polite. Only the good die young.”
    At this point a student interrupted the conversation. “I need some help.” She shifted her shoulders and her backpack, which bore a patch advocating the legalization of marijuana. “I’ve decided to drop ‘Aspects of Government’.”
    “You must inform your professor first, miss. As a common courtesy.”
    “But why?”
    “It’s policy.”
    The sternness returned to her face but left as the girl strode away. “Genevieve was nothing like that.”
    “You knew her personally?”
    She leaned over the counter.