Flourless to Stop Him Read Online Free PDF Page A

far.”

CHAPTER 3

    “W hat’s the scuttlebutt?” Grandma Ruth drove her scooter up the ramp on the side porch and onto the gray-painted floorboards of the wide Victorian porch that wrapped around my house.
    “Tim’s at the police station being questioned,” I said from my seat on the porch swing. The porch had a robin’s-egg blue–painted ceiling. The siding on the house was clapboard and painted white, with the posts and eaves painted maroon and forest green in the tradition of the painted ladies of the time it was built.
    Grandma Ruth frowned, her freckled skin bunched around her mouth. Grandma had been five foot eight, but time and bad joints had her hunched over to a little over five feet two inches. Today she wore her orange-red hair in a short cap of permed curls. Her black jacket was puffy from the feather filling. Her hands were covered by black knit gloves. She wore a bright printed skirt with little penguins dancing across a navy blue background. Her kneesockswere thick white wool and she wore white and navy athletic shoes.
    A dark brown fedora perched atop her head. Her blue eyes sparkled. “Did you call Brad?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “He’s with Tim.”
    “Well, it’s freezing out here. We can either sit out here while I have a cigarette or we can go inside and warm up by the fireplace.”
    “I vote we go in,” I said and got up slowly. “It’s supposed to snow tonight.”
    “I heard, they’re calling for six inches,” Grandma said as she drove her scooter along the porch behind me.
    I opened the front storm door and then the white panel door and let her go inside first. She darn near ran over my foot with her scooter. “Hey!”
    “Sorry,” Grandma said almost gaily as she waved her hand in the air. “You need to make the door bigger. Handicap accessible,” Grandma said as she motored her way into the foyer.
    My mother had died the previous spring of cancer complications. Like I said, it was just me and Tasha and Kip living here now. Tim had moved out. Grandma lived in the senior care apartments on Central. My other brother, Richard, and his family lived in Washington State. My sisters Joan and Rosa lived within fifty miles of Oiltop and had the habit of popping over whenever they needed something—like space from their own broods. Or a babysitter. Or a party caterer. At least Eleanor lived in California and rarely showed up unannounced.
    “You usually park the scooter outside,” I said and closed the door behind me. The floor bounced as Aubrey came running through the foyer to see who was coming in. The pup made a flying leap into Grandma’s lap. She laughed until she coughed. I took off my mittens, hat, and coat and hung them up on the coat tree in the foyer.
    The house was over a hundred years old, and while it had been remodeled almost every ten years, there were rooms still stuck in the seventies. Then again, when you had a house as big as this one, there were a lot of rooms to remodel. Generally by the time you finished updating the whole house it was time to start over.
    This explained the 1970s take on vintage Victorian den that now resembled a bordello on crack. It screamed outdated, from the dark red and cream velvet wallpaper to the dark wood and green tile around the fireplace.
    “Grandma, no scooters on the carpet!” I warned her as she started to turn into the den.
    “Geeze you’re fussy.” Grandma hit the brakes, leaving skid marks on the polished wood floors of the hallway. The house had a central foyer with the original wood floors. To the left was a formal parlor that opened into the den. To the right was the sweeping staircase. Behind the staircase and across from the den was the formal dining room. A tiny half bath was tucked in between the den and the eat-in kitchen at the back of the house.
    “What? I’m not fussy. That carpet is close to a priceless antique,” I joked. The carpet in the den was a deep green shag from the era before I was born. Over the