A Romantic Way to Die Read Online Free PDF Page B

Vernell said. “I was here, too, Sheriff, in my room, with Carrie Logan. We were getting ready for bed. Isn’t that right, Carrie?”
    Rhodes recognized Carrie, who worked at the Clearview post office. She was tall and heavy and one of the most efficient people behind the counter. Rhodes would never have guessed that she was a romance writer.
    “That’s right,” Carrie said.
    Her voice was a little shaky, as if she might be nervous. If she was, Rhodes didn’t blame her.
    “We were just about to go to bed when we heard Henrietta,” Carrie went on, her voice getting stronger. “It was more like yelling than screaming.”
    “Did you notice what time it was?” Rhodes asked.
    “It was just about eleven-thirty,” Carrie said. “I have this little travel clock that I brought with me, and it was on the dresser.”
    “How do you know it was Henrietta who yelled?” Rhodes asked.
    “Well, she’s the one who was lying on the floor when we looked in,” Carrie said.
    “And that’s when the real screaming started,” someone else put in.
    Carrie said, “You walk in on a dead woman that you’ve seen two or three times a week for the last ten years, and you’d scream, too.”
    “Who was sharing the room with Henrietta?” Rhodes asked.
    “That would be me, Sheriff,” Lorene Winslow said.
    Lorene was a teller at the First Union Bank, where Rhodes had a checking account. She had bright red hair, though Ivy had assured Rhodes that particular shade of red was rarely seen in either the plant or animal world except on Lorene. It was the color of embarrassed orange. Lorene had been married three times, two of them to the same man.
    “But I wasn’t in there with her,” Lorene went on. “I was over in the main building with Claudia and Jan.”
    A woman with short blond hair and blue eyes nodded. Standing next to her was a short, scholarly-looking woman with black hair. She nodded, too.
    “So you can see that I didn’t kill her,” Lorene said. “And I have no idea who did.”
    “Who was in the room across the hall?” Rhodes asked, but it turned out that no one had been in that room, either. The closest occupied room had been the one shared by Vernell and Carrie.
    “What did you hear before the screaming?” Rhodes asked.
    “Yelling,” Carrie said. “It was more like yelling.”
    “Right. And before the yelling, what did you hear?”
    “That’s the funny part,” Carrie said. “I didn’t hear a thing.”
    “How about you, Vernell?”
    “Not a thing,” Vernell said quickly, a little too quickly to suit Rhodes.
    “You’re sure about that?”
    “I’m sure,” Vernell said.
    While he was talking and asking questions, Rhodes moved around the room, trying to see if anyone’s shoes or robe or pants were damp, but he really couldn’t tell. Besides, any dampness would most likely have had time to dry before he arrived. Of course the bottoms of Chatterton’s pants were wet, and so were his shoes, but Chatterton had been standing outside when Rhodes arrived, and then he’d walked around the building with Rhodes to show him Henrietta’s room.
    Rhodes continued asking questions, and it was beginning to appear that everyone had an alibi, or claimed to. Everyone had been talking to someone else, or within sight of someone else, when Henrietta had begun to yell. That was the appearance, at least. Rhodes wasn’t sure how closely it matched the reality. With that many people milling around, it was possible for someone to have slipped away unnoticed and then returned.
    And while everyone seemed appalled at Henrietta’s death, two of the women were talking quietly together about motive, means, and opportunity. They seemed to know quite a bit about police work.
    Rhodes paid special attention to them. It turned out that they were two of the writers, Marian Willoughby and Belinda Marshall, both of whom told Rhodes that they were hoping to write mystery novels.
    “Janet Evanovich broke out of the romance ghetto with