Fowl Prey Read Online Free PDF Page A

as if accused of some heinous crime. Judith smirked, figuring it served her cousin right for remembering the loathsome Heraldsgate fight song. “I was president of the Honor Society!” shrieked Renie.
    â€œOh, gee!” Spud was mightily embarrassed, his pink face turning crimson. “Gosh, I’m sorry, it’s been awhile. I must have gotten you mixed up with someone else.” He gave Judith and Renie a sheepish, engaging grin. “I haven’t been back to Heraldsgate Hill since I graduated. Dad got transferred and my folks moved to Denver that summer.”
    â€œAnd you got a football scholarship,” said Judith, attempting to put Spud at ease. “So what have you been up to? Coaching?”
    Spud emitted his boisterous laugh. “Well, yeah, sort of. But not football.” He leaned forward, his face earnest, his knees pushing the table a good two inches across thestone floor. Judith and Renie clung to their plates. “I got that scholarship all right, to Nebraska, but I separated my shoulder in the first game against Oklahoma. That ended my playing days.” He paused, eliciting sympathetic looks from Judith and Renie. “But that was okay. I wasn’t all that crazy about football. I’d gotten in with some of the drama students and they had a good theater program at UN. I tried acting, but I was too clumsy on stage. Still, I really loved the theater. All those words—I didn’t know there were so many, or that you could put them together like that!” His face glowed like a baby’s; he was suddenly the eager undergraduate once again. “My folks weren’t much for culture,” Spud confessed. “My dad worked for the phone company.”
    â€œThat explains it,” said Renie, who’d had her share of run-ins over various presentations to the telecommunications industry’s top brass. “Most of the officers think Hamlet is an egg dish.”
    Spud howled. “Right,” he agreed, all but wiping his eyes, and beaming at Renie as if they had suddenly become soul mates. “So it was all new to me. And since I couldn’t act and the technical stuff was too hard and I was no writer, I had to take what was left.” He lifted his wide shoulders. “I became a director. It is like being a coach, you know.”
    A dim light shone somewhere in Judith’s mind. In almost 19 years of marriage to Dan McMonigle she hadn’t had the time or opportunity to keep up with the American theater scene. And widowhood’s responsibilities with raising a son and running a bed-and-breakfast had prevented her from catching more than the occasional movie. But somewhere along the line, the name of Frobisher was known to her other than in the guise of Spud, Heraldsgate High School lead-footed fullback. “Not Kent Frobisher?” she asked in astonishment.
    Spud pounded the table, rocking china and cutlery. “That’s right, that’s me! Isn’t it a hoot?”
    Renie was aghast. As season ticket holders to the repertory theater, she and Bill knew Kent Frobisher was oneof the most outstanding directors in the country. “Why, you’ve won a Tony! Or two! Good grief, how come the local media wags have never claimed you as their own?”
    â€œWell,” Spud replied, turning ruminative, “I’m not sure they know I’m theirs. You see, we moved around a lot because of my dad’s job, and I was only in town for the four years I was in high school. Then, when I went away to college in Lincoln, it turned out that a lot of Nebraskans work in the New York theater. I made all my contacts through them when I went back East. Everybody in the business thinks of me as a Cornhusker. Somehow, that Midwestern farm boy background was good for my image. Heck, even ‘Spud’ fitted somehow, with all due respect to Idaho.” He leaned back in the chair, looking ingenuous, and threatening to tip over onto