Date for Murder Read Online Free PDF

Grant’s chair and took a long drink from her glass before setting it down again.
    I’ll have to stop too, she thought. I’ll be getting like the rest of them. She had lost count of the drinks she had taken and she was beginning to feel numbed.
    “It’s about four o’clock,” Link said suddenly. “What say we break this up before the rest of us get carried upstairs?” His humor, Idell thought, was ponderous and unfunny.
    As if his admission of weariness had broken a restraining bond, the others rose and moved toward the door. Idell finished her drink before she followed. Leona was beside her.
    “It’ll be daylight soon,” she said. “I suppose that makes them feel safer.”
    “It has always made me feel that way,” Idell said without quite understanding. She stopped by the door to her room, just to the left of the head of the stairs and across the hallway from them.
    Next to her along the broad hallway was Grant’s room. Then Leona’s and finally Clint Jeffers’. Opposite Jeffers was an empty room, followed by a bath he would use, since the bath between his room and Leona’s room had been reserved for her. Next to the bath were two rooms, the first occupied by Chunk Farman, the other by Maybelle. Then there was a closet and the stairs, followed by Link’s room, an empty and, on the corner, Frank Manders’. Opposite them, from Idell’s room to the corner of the house, stretched the Major’s suite, now unused. The set-up, Idell thought, watching them all go through their respective doors, was without apparent arrangement. Those who had been there before—and she hazily thought they all had but Leona, at one time or another—had taken the rooms they had used formerly if available.
    Idell opened her door and slipped inside. Something she could not define made her turn the key in her door. The click as the lock settled into place was satisfying. Not that it mattered. No door was different from any other, and a common pass key would open any one in the house but the front. She had never locked her door here before that she could remember. Somehow, in this country, people didn’t.
    She crossed to the closed French doors that opened onto the balcony she shared with Grant and drew aside the curtains. It was quite dark, although a faint grey haze was beginning to show the silhouette of the mountains.
    Her view stretched north, across the patio and the rows of tall, slender date palms to the barren mountains, invisible except as black, crouching masses in the darkness. She could imagine the date palms without having to see them outlined clearly. They were hers now, hers and Grant’s. But really her own; he cared so little for them. And she could make them into something big. She could—if Grant would let her.
    She wondered what the Major’s purpose had been in giving them each half of this place. He had known Grant hated it and she loved it. She supposed he had thought that by saddling Grant with part of the responsibility he might help him settle down. But he had evidently overlooked the trust fund. That was enough to carry Grant—if he used some discretion. And there was the fact Grant could always sell to Idell and get out from under easily enough. She would have bought his share before now had she had the money. But he was not satisfied with her arrangement to pay him monthly from her earnings. He wanted to sell the entire ranch from under her. He had been almost frantically insistent when they had last spoken of it, the week before in New York.
    “I’m going to sleep,” she said aloud. The sound of her voice in the stillness was comforting. “Heaven knows I need it, if I go thinking this way.”
    She dropped her few articles of clothing in a heap on the floor and half ran into the bath. For a brief, breathless instant she stood beneath the cold shower and then dried herself to glowing pinkness on a huge, rough towel. She went back to the bed and threw herself onto it, using only a single sheet for