Bernadine Fagan - Nora Lassiter 01 - Murder by the Old Maine Stream Read Online Free PDF Page A

with the aunts I hadn’t seen since I was a child was going to be by a jail cell. Wonderful.
    The Toreador March sounded again. My friend Lori calling from New York.
    “Lori?”
    “Hi, Nora. How’s it going?”
    “Oh, just fine. I can’t talk now. I’ll call you back later.”
    “I’ll send the résumé to your phone so you can check it before I print it.”
    “Okay,” I said automatically.
    “See ya.”
    “No, wait. Too many dead spots up here. You’d better fax it. I’ll have to get back to you with a number. I’m pretty busy at the moment.”
    “Ida. Where are you?” one of the aunts called.
    “Too busy? You are coming back, aren’t you?” Lori asked.
    “I-da.” the other aunt called. “I-da.”
    I closed my eyes. “Absolutely.” Why had I ever left?
     
    Four
     
    Hannah and Agnes, the great-aunts I hadn’t seen since I was a child, were in their mid-eighties, like Ida. Hannah, a diminutive five-three with the whitest hair I’d ever seen, wore a purple blouse with a red ruffled scarf. As soon as she walked in, she grabbed me in a bear hug and got weepy.
    “I’m so happy to see you,” she said, making little sobbing noises that touched my heart. “At last. I just wish you hadn’t found a body on your second day up here. How horrible for you. Are you all right?”
    “It was a bit scary, but I’m all right now.”
    “Good. My poor little Nora.” She touched my face and stood back, then sniffled again as she studied me. “Lots of Lassiter around the eyes. Same shade of blue as Viola’s. Don’t you think, Agnes?”
    “Same trade as Viola?” Agnes repeated, cupping her ear.
    “Geez,” Ida mumbled impatiently, holding the jail cell open.
    Trimble looked on with interest.
    Hannah clarified, “Same shade eyes as Viola.”
    “Oh. Yes, yes. Beautiful eyes,” Agnes agreed.
    “Aunt Agnes,” I said, moving from Hannah to hug her. My arms did not quite fit around Agnes, who was planetary in size.
    “I remember you when you were a little girl. Such a darling girl.”
    “Who’s Viola?” I asked.
    “The vamp in the family tree,” Hannah supplied immediately. “We’ll not talk about that one. We don’t speak unkindly about the deceased.”
    Hannah looked me over again, this time more slowly, from head to toe to left hand to fourth finger.
    “You’re not married yet, Nora. How is that?”
    “I was engaged once,” I blurted, defending my status, aware of Trimble hanging on every word. Then another cop appeared in the doorway behind him and Trimble acknowledged him.
    “Chief.”
    Sheriff Nick Renzo’s brows rose a notch when he looked at me. This was the first time I’d seen him without his uniform hat. I liked his hair. It was a touch longer than most cops wear it, dark, with a bit of a wave. I forced my recently un-engaged self to look away.
    Hannah’s hand went up, palm out like a traffic cop. “No explanations necessary. You’re pretty enough to grace a magazine cover. What with your floppy, striped hair and your Viola-blue eyes you should meet a nice man and get married.”
    Floppy hair? Stripes? I’d paid a bundle for those highlights, and I’d used the hair dryer to style the floppy do this morning. I thought it looked fine.
    The sheriff and his deputy seemed to be studying my hair, too.
    “We’ll see what we can do to move things along.” Hannah looked from Agnes to Ida. “We’ll have a party. That’s the proper way of it. Shouldn’t be a problem.”
    A party to meet a man? No. Please no. “Not necessary. I don’t want to meet a man right now,” I said, and that was the truth.
    “But why?” Great-aunt Agnes asked.
    The sheriff leaned against the door frame, arms folded, his expression hard to read as he took it all in, and waited for my answer like the rest of them. Well, he wasn’t going to hear it.
    I used his arrival to shift the aunts’ focus. “I see the sheriff is here.”
    Despite his casual pose, he looked tense, stressed. This had to be the