Crime is Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

Lisa called back. “There may be some sticks for a fire out here.”
    “They’ll be wet.”
    Lisa didn’t hear the rest of Johnny’s protestations. There were times when the girl took her job too seriously; she was a secretary, not a nursemaid. Outside, the grounds became interesting. First a small patio, the flagstones half lost under moss and fallen leaves, and then a path that beckoned off through the trees. The footing was wet and treacherous. Brown needles of winters past mingled with fresh green droppings, and old brown leaves of the oak and the elm fell apart at the touch of her walking stick. A few sticks for the fire? Lisa saw nothing but the path, and yet she followed it farther only half-knowing why. After a time she came to an old wooden gate that hung on hinges rusted by time and weather. It opened, protestingly, and she found herself in what seemed to be a meadow. The grass was long, matted down by rain and wind. There were only a few trees now, but the path, still visible through the grass, led on. Lisa continued to follow it; by this time she had forgotten the firewood.
    She came upon it suddenly. The studio. First the fire-stripped studdings stretched like broken, black fingers against the darkening sky; then a fragment of wall, a charred doorframe, a rotted threshold. She needed no guide book to tell her the history of this desolate ruin. And she had to go on. She stepped through the doorway, her eyes automatically climbing to meet the flannel-gray sky striped with the few black rafters that still remained; then following the rafters downward, down to the broken walls, down to the blackened stones of a fireplace, down to the floor, charred and blistered and rotted from time and weather. The place was death itself, a horribly fascinating death, and everywhere the possessive grass reached up to claim what tragedy had left.
    “To this day no one really knows how that fire was started.”
    The professor again. Lisa tried to shrug off mentally what she already knew had drawn her to this scene. Martin Cornish. To see the place where he had died was to remember many things. The professor was right. His music was wild, erratic. To be here was to see him as he must have been that tragic night. The piano—where? Not too near the fireplace, surely. There, across the room. That was the place. Martin Cornish, alive, so terribly alive, poised on the threshold of greatness, and then Stella Larkin, the maid, coming down that long path to bear an innocent message. What had happened? What was the truth?
    “… let Martin Cornish rest in his ashes.”
    Lisa’s mind answered the professor again, but it was herself who needed the advice now. She forced her mind back to reality. That sky overhead might break out in a fresh deluge at any moment, and she was a long way from shelter. She was a long way from home. She turned back toward the charred doorway. This was no time to dream like a schoolgirl of things the wisdom of time had covered with obscurity. In this mood, she’d very likely be seeing spirits at any moment.
    And then Lisa stopped in her tracks, fascinated by what seemed to be the sudden materialization of her thought. Beyond the doorway something was moving. A dark form was rising up from the ground …
    “Mushrooms,” the woman said. “Best spot for mushrooms in these parts. Used to sneak down here all the time when I was workin’ for Mis’ Cornish. She never knew. She eats them terrible foods out of cans and packages. Terrible! Ruin your health that way. Look at me—sixty-three and never sick a day in my life! Don’t eat a thing but what nature provides: mushrooms, dandelion greens, berries, nuts—”
    The verbal deluge stopped abruptly. The woman cocked her head sideways like a foraging hen contemplating possible competition.
    “You’re new in these parts,” she said.
    Lisa was almost speechless after that culinary autobiography. The view alone would have brought on that condition. This unexpected