A Suspicious Affair Read Online Free PDF Page B

disturbed with more ill-tidings. And Tyson is busy with the packing. Heavens, I cannot decide which is harder to comprehend: Nerissa Armbruster taking her own life…or killing herself over Arvid, of all things.”
    “If you don’t mind, Your Grace, could you answer a few more questions?”
    “Certainly, Mr. Dimm, if you think it will help. Be sure I’d like to find my husband’s murderer as much as you.”
    The Runner consulted his book. “What do you think of Lord Armbruster?”
    “As a dance partner or as a killer? No, please forgive my levity, sir. I am just a trifle addled right now. Perhaps a sip of Madeira, if you’d be so kind to pour.” She indicated a decanter and glasses on the Chinese fan table. “And please join me.”
    When Dimm was reseated, thin-stemmed crystal goblet gingerly in hand, the young duchess gave her opinion of her next-door neighbor. He’d always seemed a courteous, soft-spoken gentleman when they’d met socially, she said. Of an age with Arvid, he had a much more refined air about him, making Nessie’s preference for Arvid even harder to believe. Marisol had an even harder time picturing Lord Armbruster in a rage, shooting a fellow nobleman. “Doesn’t he have an alibi? That’s what you look for, isn’t it?”
    Dimm consulted his pages again. “Well, he does and he doesn’t. He says he was visiting a friend, but he ain’t giving up the friend’s name. We located his pied-a-terre—that’s a love nest, don’t you know—but no one in the neighborhood seems to recall who meets him there.”
    “Obviously a lady whose husband is less tolerant than Lord Armbruster. But there, if he was meeting his own light-of-love, what complaint could he have with Nessie? Not enough, surely, to murder her paramour. If he feared a cuckoo bird in his nest, he’d have done better to shoot his wife, if divorce was too distasteful.”
    Dimm drew circles with his pencil. “Stap me if I’ll ever understand the gentry and their ways. Don’t none of them keep to their vows?”
    “I did, sir,” Marisol answered with that touch of arrogance he was coming to recognize as the duchess on her uppers. She might be of an age with his daughter Sarah and friendly-like to a nobody like Jeremiah Dimm, but she was a lady through and through, right down to that steel in her backbone and that slightly long, straight nose in the air.
    “Begging your pardon, Your Grace. You just seem powerful casual about Denning’s lapses, and Armbruster’s, too.”
    “And why not? It’s the way of the world.”
    “That’s what I mean, Your Grace. It’s not the way of
my
world, not by half.”
    “Are you married, Mr. Dimm?”
    “I was for twenty-two blessed years, until the good Lord saw fit to take my Cherry, and I never strayed onct.”
    “What, never?” she asked in disbelief.
    “Never even thought on it, or my name isn’t Jeremiah Dimm. I loved her too much to want any other woman.”
    “Then your Cherry was a very lucky woman, sir, to have you, and you were a lucky man to have the luxury of marrying where your heart desired. I suppose we are different, those of us considered more fortunate, for we have to wed for title and property, wealth and position. I would it were otherwise,” she said with a new bitterness in her voice. “I do envy you your good fortune.”
    “I don’t know how fortunate I am after all. Don’t suppose I’d miss her so now, iffen I’d loved her the less.”
    “I am sorry. I did not mean to bring up sad memories. Who else is on your list of suspects? Besides my brother and myself, of course. I know Foster’s name is being broadcast, but he is a right one, as the gentlemen say, although regrettably hot-to-hand. We needn’t even discuss him.”
    The Prince Regent couldn’t of done it better, Dimm decided to himself. Only thing was, the more pride she showed, the less likely he was to believe she put up with that blighter’s behavior. He’d have to think on it later. “If