Death by the Riverside Read Online Free PDF Page B

have awakened the dead, they had very little chance of ignoring it. Holloway was a large man, but age and inactivity had made him flabby. He walked with a cane, supported between it and his companion. His entrance didn’t shut up Karen, but it did change her tune.
    “This woman’s trying to ruin me, Grandfather Holloway. She’s lying. She’s working for Harry and his perverted friends.”
    You can say this for Karen, she doesn’t give up easily.
    “What is going on here?” Holloway rasped, looking at Cordelia for an answer. She told him. Now he, too, looked not thrilled to see me. His friend tried to politely ignore the family scene.
    “Give me the film,” he said. I did. He turned to Karen. “What am I going to find in these pictures?”
    His voice was tired, the sound of an old man whose traps were all sprung and the only thing he had caught was himself. She didn’t answer.
    “You disappoint me. You disappoint me deeply. After all I’ve done for you…” He went into the standard litany, punctuated with the coughing of an old man. At the end he turned to me and said, “How much do you want?”
    For a moment, I couldn’t answer, because I remembered another voice in another time asking that same question. No, not another voice, the same voice, not yet worn and scratchy. I started to feel a hollowness inside me, I wasn’t sure where. I wanted out of this nest of monsters.
    “Nothing,” I said and I walked out of the room, out of the house. When I got outside, I stood for a moment just breathing, trying to fill that hollow space with air. I felt a hand on my shoulder and a voice saying, “Are you all right?” Cordelia.
    I nodded yes, embarrassed to be caught. I just wanted to get out of here.
    “I gather you don’t do this sort of thing very often. Don’t go into blackmailing as a career.”
    “I’m not a blackmailer,” I answered. I was beginning to feel better.
    “Good thing. Here, take this.” She put an envelope in my jacket pocket. I took the envelope out.
    “No, I don’t want anything…from you.” I stumbled over the last few words.
    She put the envelope back in my pocket. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
    I took it back out. “Allergies. I’m allergic to magnolias.”
    “There aren’t any magnolia trees here.”
    “Also oaks.” There had to be oak trees at One Hundred Oaks Plantation.
    “Right. Why don’t I believe you? Why do I keep wondering, what’s in this for you?” Danny’s precious Cordelia obviously thought I was one of Karen’s unctuous friends.
    “Never to see any of you again.” I was tired of this and I resented her assumption that I had to have some ulterior motive for being here.
    “No one asked you to get involved in the first place,” she shot back.
    “Wrong. Your sister Karen did. I just had to finish what I started. I wasn’t going to let her fuck me in the front seat of her BMW and then cheat Harry out of his inheritance for being queer. Listen, I’ve got to go…”
    “Cousins,” she broke in. “Harry and Karen are my cousins.”
    “Whatever. Enjoy your mansion. I’ve handed it to you on a silver platter, haven’t I?”
    She stuffed the envelope back into my pocket. “Now you’re wrong. I don’t want the place. I never did. When Grandpa wrote his ridiculous will, one of the first things I did was tell him that I’m a lesbian. Of course, I’m not.”
    “Of course not,” I broke in.
    “To guarantee that I wouldn’t get this old place and that I wouldn’t be caught in any of the squabbles about it.”
    “How noble,” I interjected.
    “Aren’t we both? You altruistically sleeping with Karen and taking pictures of it and me passing up the chance to co-own a fake antebellum mansion with a pack of barracudas.”
    There didn’t seem much else to say. We stood facing each other in the moonlight. With any other woman, in any other place, it might have been romantic.
    “Well…” she finally broke the silence, “you’d better get out