Best Friends Read Online Free PDF Page A

liked the understandable things: comfort, convenience, good manners, affection; they were easy to name.
    He continued along the stretch of driveway that led behind the house and, so as not to throw up a spatter of scarring pebbles, braked gently when he got there. The rear of the building was more glass than stone, with its big sunroom giving onto a tiled terrace, from which the pool, screened by a stand of poplars, was inconspicuous, though it was sizable when you swam there. Roy had occasionally done so, always alone, for Kristin apparently did not care for the sport, and though Sam did nothing to improve his figure, he was averse to revealing it.
    At the door to the kitchen Roy remembered that Sam’s directions had applied specifically to the coded buttons under the house-number panel near the front door. Naturally, no number was posted in back. Could that mean, for all the security out front, access to the rear was gained by a simple key? Unlikely with anyone else, but to be called possible if not probable in Sam’s case.
    Well, he could not find a key, either, though he suspected one was secreted someplace in the proximity of the door, perhaps in a fake plastic rock or another disguise. He ended up hiking around front and, using the prescribed method, which surprised him by functioning without a hitch, he entered the Grandy abode. From a blinking red light he became aware of another and more elaborate touchpad that flanked the front entrance on the inside. It was reasonable to assume that punching the code outdoors had disarmed the alarm system throughout the interior, but these gadgets were tyrannical by nature and usually required further pacification measures lest they exact raucous punishment.
    Sam, of course, had neglected to instruct him to do more than spring the lock, but Roy punched in the same reversed birth date, with evident success, for the red light stayed on but stopping winking.
    The house, unlike most others of his acquaintance, had no smell at all when entered. A restaurant-strength exhaust system disposed of culinary odors, which Roy thought was too bad, for Kristin’s were aromas. The greatest contrast would be offered by Robin’s residence when he delivered the coffee machine. Children, even though they personally did not stink except with loaded diapers, could cause a place to smell, sometimes by ricochet, so to speak: A grape-juice spill might be treated with a stain remover that left a chemical stench for hours.
    In the kitchen the Stecchino was not as prominent as he anticipated. Kristin, or perhaps the Dominican cleaning woman, had moved it into the farthest corner of the polished granite counter at the perimeter of the room, as opposed to where Sam surely had installed it on the center island overhung by the glistening copper hood that housed the exhaust fan. Tall and heavy, bristling with dials, spouts, buttons, and levers, it was even gaudier than promised. Knowing what gadgetry could cost, more from Sam’s experience than his own, he who preferred vintage stuff, he saw immediately that the “seven hundred something” of Kristin’s estimate would not even be in the same ballpark with the true price.
    He had forgotten the matter of padding. Sam was right that this machine should be handled with care—for the sake of the Alvis’s upholstery; it was much too big to fit in the boot, which was to say, trunk.
    His quest for the linen closet would probably take a while. Living only a few miles away, Roy had never stayed the night under this roof and had not visited the second floor since his initial tour of the place a week before the Grandys moved in. He felt uncomfortable as he mounted the central stairway and had to check an impulse to tiptoe through the upstairs hall as though he were an intruder. He hoped the search would not take him as far as their bedroom or bath.
    He was in luck. Having turned right at the top of the stair, he had gone along what