Bowled Over Read Online Free PDF Page A

parties. It was silly. She stopped and watched Craig’s gray eyes behind the glinting glass of horn-rimmed spectacles.
    He sighed and shook his head. The front door chime sounded just then, and Matt Laskan poked his head into Craig’s office a moment later. “Just me,” he said. He glanced at Jaymie and smiled, then said to Craig, “I just got done at the insurance agent’s office. That little break-in we had last week is not going to be worth claiming, despite the scrambled hard drive and the broken window. We’ll have to just pay the costs and swallow it. But we’ll have to be more vigilant, my friend, about keeping the alarm on.”
    “Thanks for taking care of it, Matt.”
    The fellow glanced at Jaymie, then said, “I ran into Kathy. She seems to think that the move idea is still on. Haven’t you had the talk with her yet?”
    “Can we get into this later, Matt?” Craig asked, glancing swiftly at Jaymie and then back to his partner with a significant look.
    “Okay, all righty. Just sayin’. You gotta keep the old lady in line.” He disappeared, whistling, presumably to his own office.
    Hoppy, alerted by the whistle, whined a little and stood up, wobbling toward the door to the end of his leash. Jaymie tugged him back, and asked, “What did Matt mean about a move idea?”
    “Nothing!” Craig said. “Jaymie, just leave Kathy alone. She’s got enough on her mind without
you
screwing things up more.” His tone was irritable, where it
had
been calm and equable.
    What had happened? She stood up. She was not going to leave it alone, but she didn’t have to tell him that she was going to go talk to Kathy’s best girlfriend now. Maybe Kathy told her girlfriend things she didn’t tell her husband. “I’ll let you get back to work, Craig. Sorry to bother you.”
    He nodded.
    But Jaymie just had to ask again, as her brain processed the remark Craig’s partner had made. “So…are you moving? You guys leaving town?”
    “No, of course not. It’s nothing important.” He didn’t meet her eyes and was already tapping away on the number pad of his keyboard, clearly signaling he was too busy to talk.
    She glanced at her watch as she left the accounting office. Time for a brisk walk through Boardwalk Park, then to the feed-and-tack store down by the dock.
    Queensville, situated as it was on the St. Clair River across from Johnsonville, Ontario, overlooked Heartbreak Island, shared by both Ontarians and Michiganders. The Leighton family owned Rose Tree Cottage on the island, and Jaymie oversaw its cleaning and rental through the spring, summer and autumn months, a task that most cottage owners assigned to a property management company. She stood on the walkway and leaned on the railing, watching a Norwegian tanker navigate the shipping channel, the narrow waterway in the middle of the river that was deep enough to accommodate such vessels. The tanker moved north majestically past Heartbreak Island, and back into the deeper blue of the safer passage in the middle of the St. Clair. The day was warming up. Canada was clear right now, the tiny townof Johnsonville just a green blob on the far shore, but on some mornings in summer there would be a haze near the river, a profound fog so white and dense nothing could be seen. A foghorn would sound to remind ships to navigate carefully.
    As she strolled with Hoppy down the walkway, Jaymie’s mind drifted to the problem of Daniel Collins. Until recently she hadn’t thought much about Daniel, who ran a computer software applications company out of Phoenix, Arizona. Three years before, while driving through Queensville, he’d bought historic Stowe House on a whim; the Queen Anne–style gem of a house was where the Tea with the Queen event was held each May. How rich did you have to be to be able to buy a house like that on a whim? Fortunately for the village, he had become a good and careful conservator of a piece of local history.
    Recently they had gotten much