Dead and Buried Read Online Free PDF Page A

the hotel’s laundress and Lucille Chabot, whom January knew did his mother’s laundry.
    A half-written letter to Mayor Prieur demanded to know why an establishment where deceased and rotting bodies were stored was permitted to continue within fifty feet of a respectable hotel.
    Nothing seemed out of place.
    The first thing that caught January’s attention when he softly entered the Viscount Foxford’s room was that the rug was missing. In the former two chambers, finely-woven straw-mats had made ovals of pale yellow beside the beds, smooth to the feet in the mornings and bright against the scrubbed reddish cypress-wood of the floors. In this, the handsomest room of the four, one would expect accommodation at least as good, in keeping with the gilt on the mirror-frame and the size of the armoire . . .
    Yet there was none. Turning back the counterpane, January noted that one of the bed pillows was fresh, the sham rigid with starch, the other nearly so. The sheets also bore the appearance of having been slept in only once, and that briefly, the folds in most places still bright. Yet – he had heard his mother lecture her servant on the subject – beneath the counterpane, the bed had been clumsily made, with nothing of the taut care with which the chambermaids had renewed those in the other rooms. The dressing table contained a set of sterling silver ‘gentlemen’s furnishings’ – brush, comb, toothbrush and powder, clothes brushes, and another bejewelled ceremonial dagger.
    He tiptoed to the door that communicated with the parlor. Shaw was saying, ‘Now, are you tellin’ me this Aunt Elodie wa’n’t allowed to leave her money where she chose?’
    ‘My dear Abishag – may I call you Abishag? Such an American name! – when one reaches the more elevated levels of good society – in Britain, at least – the disposal of one’s own property, however acquired, becomes very much the business of The Family . . .’
    They sounded settled for some time yet. Soft-footed for so large a man, January knelt to look beneath the bed. As he put his face close to the floor he smelled, in the still pocket of air trapped by the hanging counterpane, the whiff of blood, a smell unmistakable after years of working in the night clinic of Paris’s Hôtel Dieu. There was something under there that looked like a man’s watch, but he knew Shaw would find it. Knew, too, that the item’s position would communicate information to the policeman if left in situ . So, curious though he was, he lowered the counterpane again and crossed the bedroom to the door that opened into another dressing-room, and thence into the room of the murdered man.
    As January passed between the neat shelves and piled luggage, he wondered how the travelers had come to the arrangement that they had. The two bedrooms adjoining the parlor were the handsome ones, clearly intended for the more important members of the party. Those on either end of the suite, though nearly as elegant in their appointments, were smaller and distinctly poky.
    Had young Foxford requested Derryhick – who was, after all, paying for the suite – as a neighbor? Had Derryhick loathed – or mistrusted – both Droudge and Stuart to the extent that he’d choose to take a smaller room rather than lodge in one that either had access to?
    Curious.
    Derryhick’s room boasted the same oval of braided straw beside the bed that had graced Droudge’s and Stuart’s. His pillows and sheets, like theirs, though clearly smoothed and readjusted by expert chambermaids, had been slept on several nights. Along with the usual brushes and toiletries there was another Indian dagger on the bureau, and a third tucked in the handkerchief drawer, beside a box of bullets for a pistol.
    A curiously well-armed company. On the other hand, when January had lived in France, every single one of his friends there had been convinced that America was a place where one had to fight Indians every morning just to get