A Study in Revenge Read Online Free PDF Page B

in his study.” Lean recited the lie in good conscience and with a casual fluidity. He’d repeated it many times in the past year. The doctor’s niece, Helen Prescott, had insisted on it inorder not to cast a shadow on the legacy of the late doctor’s work with some of his mentally troubled patients.
    “I’ve heard rumors otherwise.”
    “Then you’ve been misled. You’re correct about one thing, however.”
    “Which is?”
    “You are not Dr. Steig. He was a consummate professional and a good man.” Lean tipped his hat and exited the morgue.
    The memory of Dr. Steig’s unhappy end was painful in its own right. More so because of Lean’s insistence on second-guessing what he and Grey could have done differently last summer. Their misplaced certainty over the identity of the killer they were pursuing had allowed the true madman to claim a final victim. Lean forced himself to at least realize that it could have been worse. After the doctor’s death, they had managed to save Helen Prescott and her young daughter, Delia. The whole grisly ordeal had left Helen and the girl shaken, of course. Helen had taken a sabbatical from her post at the historical society and gone to stay with some distant relations in Connecticut. She’d been planning to return to Portland eventually, but Lean hadn’t heard anything recently, and so he could only wonder and hope that the woman and her sweet child were doing well.
    He shook his head, trying to sweep away the cobwebs of last summer’s tragic events. This was a new case; he needed to focus on his next step and figure out who could have tampered with the dead man’s coffin.

    “W HEN I WAS YOUNG , it was cabinetmakers who used to make coffins,” said the undertaker, Harry Rich. “The old boxes with six sides, narrow at the foot. Even when I first started, after the war, coffins were still made by hand, good and solid.”
    “Last a lifetime?” Lean suggested. He didn’t think the undertaker would mind. The man was far more animated than Lean had expected. He couldn’t shake the foolish preconception that all undertakers should be tall, gaunt men with serious expressions and voices as quiet and somber as the turning of the pages in a Bible.
    “So to speak,” Rich said with a chuckle that shook his rotund belly. “They’d last a lot of years anyways. But there’s no undertakers leftin town who make their own coffins anymore. The manufacturing of them’s a business of its own these days. In most of the large manufactories, they’re done with machinery.”
    The man led the way from the funeral parlor’s vestibule into the chapel. Rows of chairs faced a casket surrounded by a generous selection of floral arrangements. Lean paused at the sight.
    “So the coffin that Frank Cosgrove was buried in was …”
    “The least expensive that we had on hand. Eleven dollars. Coffins can cost up to fifty. Though we don’t sell as many these days. Cloth-covered caskets is what most folks want. Some of those can go for hundreds.”
    “Honestly?”
    The undertaker wiped his small, round glasses with a handkerchief. “It all depends on the inside trimmings: a good satin or velvet or even silk. Of course, there’s always been a range of costs. It used to be that even rich folk would be buried in regular coffins, only they’d be made of San Domingo mahogany. Try laying your hands on that anymore.”
    “I thought Cosgrove’s thin pine box was a thing of the past. I mean, they even have metallic ones now.”
    “Yes, but they’ll never take the place of good chestnut, oak, or walnut. The iron generally corrodes, so they’re not used much anywhere in New England. I hear they do better in the South—better suited to the climate, I suppose. Besides, they’re terribly heavy just to move about properly.”
    “You handle all the bodies yourself?” Lean asked.
    “Me or my son. Unless it’s a female who’s died. We have a woman who’ll go round the house, prepare the body, and