Crime is Murder Read Online Free PDF

visitor was all of six feet tall. She wore a shapeless coat of some shabby material not recognizable in the fading light and a battered felt hat that seemed to be a man’s discarded fedora; and beneath the brim of this headgear was a face that had never known the touch of a cosmetic. Her eyes were dark and unwavering, and her hands, red and work-worn, were stained with the damp earth. Over her shoulder hung a long canvas bag into which she’d been stuffing the mushrooms.
    And between them hung the unanswered question.
    “Yes, I am new,” Lisa said. “I’m Lisa Bancroft. I’ve just taken the Masterson House.”
    “So you’re the one. I just been up there. Nobody was home. Folks call for help an’ then traipse off—”
    The unfinished sentence was left dangling while the woman ducked out of sight momentarily. She appeared again with another mushroom in her hand, and by this time Lisa understood.
    “You must be Carrie Hokum!” she said.
    “That’s right. Anybody ‘round here’d tell you that. Guess I’ve worked in ‘most every house on The Bluffs one time or other.”
    Lisa wanted to laugh, but she didn’t dare. She was thinking of Johnny and that can opener. “I hope you cook food out of cans and packages,” she suggested.
    “Cook anything,” Carrie said, “so long as I don’t have to eat it. Too much cookin’ spoils food, just like cans. Nobody eats right nowadays. That’s what’s wrong with the world. Don’t eat right and your brain shrinks. Well, you’ll be wanting your supper now, I guess.”
    Carrie didn’t wait for an answer. She started back down the path with gigantic strides. Now Lisa could see the heavy walking shoes and thick-ribbed stockings underneath the long skirt of the coat. She started to follow; her own strides quite a bit shorter, and then, when it seemed Carrie would completely outdistance her, the woman stopped quite suddenly and turned about.
    “You didn’t come down here lookin’ for mushrooms,” she said.
    It was a fact. Lisa couldn’t deny it.
    “No, I didn’t,” she said.
    “Then why did you come?”
    Why? To look for firewood? That answer would have sounded preposterous even to Carrie Hokum. She was the kind of person who would make one tell the truth even if it had to be discovered on the spot.
    “Someone told me about the old ruins,” Lisa said. “I wanted to see them. It was Martin Cornish’s studio, you know.”
    “That one!”
    Carrie’s face was outraged, even the dusk couldn’t hide that. “Got what he deserved there, too. Him carryin’ on with that no good woman and his legal-wedded wife up yonder with a tot to mind!”
    She stared off across the meadow in such a fixed way that Lisa’s gaze was bound to follow. She saw then what preoccupation with following the path had kept her from seeing before: a house, a huge, dark shadow of a house perched high on a knoll above the meadow. Bell Mansion, Lisa knew. There was no need to ask. And then, as if on cue to the distant prompters, a sound of music began to drift across the meadow.
    “What’s that—?” Lisa began, and then fell silent. The music had a stronger voice. A piano. Someone in that dark house on the hill was playing a piano. Hauntingly, pleadingly—a theme so tender that for a time the very wind seemed to be listening. And then the music stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Stopped unfinished so that the ears strained for the next chord.
    But the chord that came was a crash of dissonance. Then silence. Angry silence that would not sing again. Moments later the lights came on in the house.
    “And there’s another one just like him,” Carrie muttered. “Same wild blood, same wild ways. Any house on The Bluffs I’ll work in, but not that one. Not any more. That’s an evil house. A house of death.”

CHAPTER 4
    Twice in one day an allusion to death had been made in connection with Marta Cornish, but Lisa had no more chance to question Carrie further that evening than she’d had