Dying to Please Read Online Free PDF

was more forceful than an armored tank. For all that, Sarah really liked the woman; Barbara was good-hearted and good-tempered, just relentless.
    The insurance agent arrived while the Judge was still talking to his daughter, so Sarah showed him the damage and was in the process of giving him the pertinent information for filing the claim—she even had the Judge's receipt for the purchase of the television, which impressed the hell out of the insurance agent—when Judge Roberts came wandering into Sarah's tiny office, looking pleased with himself.
    “Guess who called,” he said.
    “Barbara,” Sarah said.
    “After that. The call beeped in, thank God, or I'd still be talking to her. Some television reporter wants to come out and do a feature on us.”
    “Us?” Sarah asked blankly.
    “You, mostly.”
    She stared at him, startled. “Why?”
    “Because you foiled a robbery, you're a young woman, and you're a butler. He wants to know all about butlering. He said it would be a wonderful human-interest piece. Silly phrase, isn't it? ‘Human-interest.' As if monkeys or giraffes would be remotely interested.”
    “That's wonderful,” said the insurance agent enthusiastically. “Which station is it?”
    The Judge pursed his lips. “I forget,” he said after a moment. “Does it matter? But they'll be here tomorrow morning at eight.”
    Sarah hid her dismay. Her daily routine would be totally destroyed for the second day in a row. The Judge, however, was clearly excited about the prospect of his butler being interviewed. He and his friends were all retired, so they had no outlets for their natural competitiveness other than themselves. They played poker and chess, they swapped tall tales, and they tried to one-up each other. This would be a major coup for him. And even if it wasn't, she could scarcely refuse; as much as she adored him, she never forgot he was her employer.
    “I'll be ready,” she said, already mentally reshuffling her day so everything would be as perfect as she could make it.

CHAPTER 3
    HE ALWAYS WATCHED ONE OF THE LOCAL STATIONS IN THE mornings, while he drank his hot tea and read the financial section of the
Birmingham News.
He liked to keep abreast of community happenings and politics so he could discuss them with his associates. He was actually very interested in what happened in and around Birmingham. This was his home; he had a vested interest in how the area fared.
    Mountain Brook was faring very well, indeed. He took immense pride in the fact that the small town just south of Birmingham had one of the highest per capita income levels in the nation. Part of the reason for that was all the doctors who lived there and practiced in and around Birmingham, which had morphed from a steel city into an important medical center, with a disproportionate number of hospitals for its population. People came from all over the country, indeed, from all over the world, to be treated in Birmingham hospitals.
    But it wasn't just doctors who lived in Mountain Brook. Professional people of all trades made their homes here. There was old money and there was new money. There were small starter houses, for young couples who wanted to live in Mountain Brook for the prestige and also for the school system for their children. There were mansions, and there were massive estates that made visitors gawk as they drove past.
    His own home was his pride and joy, a three-story beauty fashioned of gray stone, lovingly furnished and maintained. It was eighteen thousand square feet, with six bedrooms and eight and a half baths. The four fireplaces were real, the marble was Italian, the two-inch-thick Berber carpeting the best money could buy. The pool was landscaped so it resembled a lovely grotto, with subtle underwater lighting and silver water trickling over stones before gently falling into the pool.
    Five acres of land surrounded his home; five acres was a lot in Mountain Brook, with its astronomical land values. His