Hotel Paradise Read Online Free PDF

dime. The red flag was up on Bunny Caruso’s pickup. “Ubub is for Useless Big Bob and Ulub is for Useless Little Bob. You got a dime, Maud?”
    “What?” I asked, puzzled over these names.
    “He’s making it up,” said Maud, digging in her pocket and bringing out a dime. She always had change because of the tips she got.
    “No, it’s true,” he said. He slotted the coin into the meter and turned the handle.
    “You’re making it up,” said Maud again, with absolute confidence in her verdict.
    She’s always accusing the Sheriff of “making it up,” and once in a while I think maybe he does, with her, so that she can never be absolutely sure when he’s telling the truth.
    “I could see you doing it, I could see your mind making it up, just in that pause while you thought up something that UBB and ULB could stand for.”
    “UBB” and “ULB” are the first three digits (or letters) on the license plates of Ubub’s and Ulub’s twin pickup trucks. That’s where whoever started calling them by those names got the idea, as far as I know.
    The Sheriff didn’t answer Maud; he just went on inspecting and then kicking the tires of Bunny Caruso’s truck, and I could tell Maud was really irritated because he wouldn’t say anything. Indeed, she looked so frustrated, I thought she just might cross over to the bench and ask Ulub and Ubub.
    “Well, they are kind of useless,” I said.
    “Don’t listen to him; don’t pay any attention to him at all. He makes up half what he says.” She spoke as if the Sheriff might be some wayward playmate who could lead me astray.
    We walked on down Second Street, and Maud seemed to be in a snit, which I thought was really funny, since the last person in La Porte I could imagine being in a snit with was Sheriff Sam DeGheyn.
    I decided to break into this mild fuming of hers by reintroducing my topic. “Do you believe a place can be haunted?”
    “No.” “Yes.”
    They answered in unison; I don’t know if Maud said yes because she believed it or if it was just to get his goat.
    “Nobody’s lived in the Devereau house since Mary-Evelyn died, have they?”
    “Not that I know of,” said the Sheriff.
    The thing was, though, that he and Maud hadn’t been around then, and anything they said was guessing.
    “Marge Byrd said she heard really weird noises coming from the house one night.”
    “Probably vagrants. Some people don’t pay attention to No Trespassing signs. Donny said he had to chase some people out of there once.”
    Donny is deputy sheriff. He isn’t very smart or good-looking, but he thinks he’s both in his uniform. Ree-Jane hangs around the courthouse to impress him, too, when the Sheriff’s not there.
    “A person who dies in a state of misery has been known to come back and haunt the place where he dies.” Maud looked as if she were about to.
    “I think you mean a person who’s suffered a violent death,” the Sheriff said.
    She stopped walking. “No, I mean a miserable person, like me. And you.”
    The Sheriff’s beeper had buzzed just a stroke before she said “And you,” which I bet was an afterthought, that she wanted to make him hesitate and wonder just before he had to answer his beeper. (I always think a person must be very important to have a beeper, anyway.)
    “Me? Just because you’re—oh, never mind. . . . Donny?” he said into the beeper.
    Donny’s voice rasped over the beeper, saying something about an accident out on Route 6—the Lake Road, we called it, although I think its official name was Splinter Run Road. It sounded like Donny was talking about the Silver Pear Restaurant, but since he always got a little hysterical over police business it was hard to tell. Also, it was hard to hear; it was private police business, but I cocked my ear anyway. Maud was looking off towards the railroad tracks as if she couldn’t care less.
    I asked the Sheriff what a “domestic” meant and he said it generally had to do with a