All Murders Final! Read Online Free PDF

spotted a blue and white porcelain lamp a couple of tables down and strolled over to it. “How much?” I asked the woman behind the table. She’d started packing away a few of her things.
    â€œIt’s broken,” she said, looking around. “Have to be honest at a church sale.”
    I turned the lamp over but didn’t see any cracks or chips in the porcelain.
    â€œNo,” the woman said. “It doesn’t turn on anymore.”
    Ah, so it just needed new wiring, an easy fix. Any hardware store carried socket kits, and I probably had one at home. I was pretty sure the base was from the forties, and once I fixed it, the lamp would be worth at least thirty dollars. A sticker on it said TEN DOLLARS. “ Since it’s broken, would you take three?” Was this lying in a church? Would a bolt of lightning strike me dead? Was it wrong to be here after finding Margaret this morning? Since nothing happened, I decided I was okay.
    â€œI guess so, but why would you want it if it’s broken?” She shook her head, clearly thinking I was an odd duck. She marked the price down on the sticker. “Terrible news about Margaret More, isn’t it?”
    I nodded my agreement, not trusting myself to say anything, and placed the lamp in one of my totes.
    I bartered with a man over a set of salt and pepper shakers—vintage Mr. and Mrs. Claus. I’d found them at the bottom of a box full of old dish towels—not old in a good, antique way, but old as in worn and stained. It paid to dig through boxes. I’d turned up a lot of treasures over the years by doing just that. The man wanted twelve dollars for the shakers but agreed to five. I moved around the sale listening to people’s reactions to Margaret’s death. I bought a blue cobalt glass vase thick with dust. An unframed watercolor of a cabin in the snow was my last purchase. I’d fix it all up and sell it at the February Blues garage sale on base.
    As I paid for my purchases and thought about the conversations I’d overheard, I realized about 85 percent of the people felt terrible about Margaret dying, another 10 percent seemed ambivalent, and the last 5 percent appeared almost happy. I wondered about those people.
    * * *
    My apartment had a slanted ceiling, so it was high on one side and sloped to a four-foot wall on the other. A small door in the wall allowed access to a good-size place to store things. My phone rang as I started to stash my purchases away in the storage space. CJ.
    â€œI heard you had a rough day,” CJ said. His low voice rumbled over the line like a lightning bolt into my heart. We might be divorced, but when he spoke to me with such a caring tone, it was easy to forget everything that had happened between us.
    â€œI’ve had better, but compared to Margaret’s day, I’m fine. Is there an official cause of death?” I sat down on one of the two chairs at my small kitchen table and started tracing the pattern of the flowers on the vintage tablecloth with my finger. It wasn’t that different than the one stuffed in Margaret’s mouth, the one I had wanted so much last night. Sometimes I was an idiot.
    CJ sighed. “You know I couldn’t tell you if there was. You have to wait and find out like every other resident of Ellington.”
    â€œA girl can hope,” I answered.
    â€œDid you remember anything else about the photo that was sent to you?”
    My heart dropped a little. This was an official call, not a personal one. A small town police chief doing his job. “I don’t remember anything else. Where are you?”
    â€œAt a conference for chiefs of small police departments.” He paused. “In Monterey.”
    Monterey? I’d grown up in Pacific Grove, a small town next to Monterey. When I was eighteen, my mother had warned me to stay away from the military men at the Defense Language Institute, just up the hill from our house. So,