Best Place to Die Read Online Free PDF

me home?’
    Not often at a loss, Lil again thought of Bradley’s truism:
the first person’s pulse to check is your own.
‘Are any of you hurt?’
    â€˜I don’t think so,’ Ada said.
    â€˜How would you know?’ Rose shot back, her rage at the boiling point. ‘How could you possibly know what you’ve just put me through?’
    â€˜Is anything hurting, Mother?’ Ada asked. ‘Have you broken anything?’
    â€˜And if I had what would you care? Connecticut’s safe, you said. I can go on bus trips and visit all my friends back in the city. Safe? Safe? You call this safe?’
    Lil kept quiet and surmised that, based on the volume and pitch of Rose’s fury, she was probably OK. But it was Delia Preston she couldn’t take her eyes off. Her neck twisted unnaturally to the side, her skirt hiked up revealing well-toned legs and the tops of her stockings, held in place by a black-lace garter belt –
people still wear those?
She approached the fallen body, her feet crunching in tiny shards. She looked up at a shattered window on the fourth floor, the only broken pane in this portion of the building. There was no smoke coming out, at least nothing like on the other side. Aaron came up beside her. ‘I checked for a pulse,’ he offered. ‘I’m pretty sure she’s dead.’
    Lil knelt and placed two fingers on Delia’s badly twisted neck where the carotid pulse should have been; she felt nothing. ‘What now?’ she said to herself, as she looked up at Aaron and then at Ada, her mother and the other woman on the bench. She needed to get everyone out of here, but you don’t exactly walk away from a dead body. Fishing through her bag she found her iPhone. She knew that Hank Morgan, Grenville’s Chief of Police, had to be here. His line was busy, but he picked up on the second try.
    â€˜Lil?’ His deep voice was backed by sirens.
    â€˜Hank, I know you’ve got more on your plate right now than you want, but I’m at the back of Nillewaug and there’s a dead body just next to the ambulance bays; it looks like she jumped.’
    â€˜What are you doing back there? You shouldn’t be here, Lil.’ Something paternal and a touch patronizing in his voice.
    â€˜Ada’s mother is a resident. We heard the fire and . . .’
    â€˜How’d you get by the road block?’
    Not wanting to get that young trooper in trouble she lied, ‘We came through before the barricades went up. Something else, the body; I know who she is. It’s the administrative director for Nillewaug, her name’s Delia Preston.’
    â€˜Delia? Shit! You said she jumped?’
    â€˜Looks like.’
    â€˜Lil, don’t touch a thing, I’m on my way.’
    â€˜Sure,’ she said, and as the phone went dead she dropped it in the bag and retrieved her camera. She took quick stills of Delia, of the window, and zoomed in on clusters of Nillewaug residents, some sobbing, but most eerily quiet around the periphery on benches placed as ornamental stopping points on a carefully measured and maintained walking path. Checking the battery – not much juice left – she shot a video, remembering long-ago lessons from college, when she’d harbored a fantasy of becoming a journalist with a major newspaper or magazine. This of course never happened, her life took a different turn – wife, mother and office manager for her physician spouse. As she panned the horrific scene she thought about the who, what, when, where and why of reporting. With the camera’s red light blinking she narrated, keeping her voice soft, ‘It’s five a.m. on Sunday, April third, two thousand and eleven. I’m on the scene of a multi-alarm fire at the assisted-living complex, Nillewaug Village in Grenville, Connecticut. There is at least one fatality, Delia Preston.’ She zoomed in on the dead woman’s face.