Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7) Read Online Free PDF

the laundry room in her slippers.
    ‘What?’ he said, distracted.
    ‘That rich doctor. She killed her husband. That’s what you’re looking at, aren’t you? More stories about her? You haven’t talked about anything else for days.’
    Howard shrugged defensively. Carol was right, but he wasn’t going to say so. His mouse was poised to close the window on his screen if she came closer. ‘You don’t know that she killed him. Nobody knows what happened. She says she’s innocent.’
    Carol flopped down on the threadbare sofa on the other side of the room, underneath posters of the Great Wall of China and the statues of Easter Island. Places he’d never been but had always wanted to visit. His wife pulled out an emery board and worked on her fingernails. ‘Do you think she’d admit it if she were guilty?’
    ‘No,’ he acknowledged.
    ‘Well, there you go. Everyone at Super One is talking about her. They all think she killed him.’
    Super One was a local grocery store. Carol had worked there as a checker since she was in high school. They’d met at the store when Howard tried to take fifteen items down the ten-items-or-less aisle, and Carol refused to let him through.
    He found himself getting annoyed. ‘Oh, so the detectives at the store have it figured out. I’ll call the police and tell them you cracked the case.’
    Carol rolled her eyes. ‘Come on, Howard. A mysterious stranger sneaks in while Dr. Perfect is in the shower? He blows away her husband and escapes? She must think we’re idiots.’ She leaned forward and lowered her voice. ‘It just goes to show you, a rich white doctor marrying a black man like that? Nothing good is going to come of it.’
    ‘Don’t talk like that,’ Howard snapped. ‘That’s offensive.’
    ‘I’m just saying what everyone is thinking.’
    ‘Well, don’t say it.’
    ‘Whatever.’ Carol shrugged and kept filing her nails. The drier tumbled in another part of the basement, and he heard a zipper banging on the metal drum.
    His wife wore a long-sleeved Minnesota Vikings T-shirt and gray sweatpants. She always wore loose clothes to cover the extra ten pounds she complained about. Her mousy brown hair was pushed back behind her ears. She grabbed a tissue to blow her nose, which was a little too large for the rest of her face. Her eyes were brown, and her winter-pale skin sported a few freckles.
    ‘I booked the Dells for our vacation in July,’ she told him.
    Howard picked up his high school bowling trophy from the desk and rubbed a little dust from the base with the sleeve of his shirt. ‘Do we have to go there again? We’ve been there three years in a row.’
    ‘I love it there. So does Annie.’
    ‘Well, we’ve done it already,’ Howard complained. ‘We should go someplace else.’
    ‘Well, what about Branson?’
    Howard frowned and didn’t answer. They’d been to Branson three times, too. Everything about their lives was as predictable as an assembly line. Same vacations. Same television shows. Same meals. It was Wednesday, and Wednesday was meatloaf day. Every week, all year. For Carol, routine was like a suit of armor against change. Change was bad. Change was scary. She wanted her world to stay exactly the same.
    He understood why she felt that way. At twelve years old, Carol had walked into the garage and found her father hanging by his belt from an overhead beam. Her perfect suburban childhood had been stolen away. She was never going to let that happen again.
    Howard put down his trophy with a frustrated little bang. Janine Snow stared at him from his computer monitor. Dr. Perfect.
    ‘Fine, we can go to the Dells if that’s what you want,’ he said with a sigh. Surrender was the easiest way to keep peace.
    ‘Good. It’ll be fun. We can go to that supper club you like. The one by the lake.’
    ‘Uh huh.’
    Carol got up from the sofa. She looked pleased with herself. ‘You coming to bed?’
    ‘I want to work on tomorrow’s lesson plan,’ he