How Do I Love Thee? Read Online Free PDF Page B

makes you think a doctor who also happens to be a savvy investor has anything to do with a pile of smiley-faced sticky notes or, for that matter,dubious behaviour worthy of accusing him as this poor woman’s stalker?’
    ‘Show them,’ Symes said, to which Moser revealed a photocopy of their so-called evidence. ‘There’s more, but this one’s the clincher.’
    It was a post-it-note with a half-scrawled poem.
    How do I love ya? Babe, let’s count the ways:
    Doggy style, sixty-nine, on my old chaise …
    I giggled. I couldn’t help myself. ‘That doesn’t sound like him.’
    ‘Dead drunk, maybe,’ Death said. ‘But that doesn’t sound like Martin Cage to me either.’
    ‘We found this among his other notes-in-progress, along with …’ Slimy Symes paused for emphasis again and I could almost hear the drum roll … ‘Sleeping tablets and a broken bottle of whisky.’
    ‘That means nothing,’ Death argued. ‘You’d need those too, if you knew even
one
of his ex-wives!’
    ‘Are you defending the situation as her physician, Doc, or him as his best friend?’
    ‘As his boss actually. He didn’t show for work today, and now I’ve learned that he’s in custody? I’m telling you, he works too many hours here between the wards and the morgue to have any time left for such nonsense!’
    ‘The morgue?’ I wondered aloud.
Maybe that explained my weird dream?
    ‘Is that significant?’ Moser asked.
    I shrugged. ‘We all die eventually.’
    ‘Think, please,’ Symes persisted. ‘Any little detail can be important, even something that might have been filed away as unimportant by your subconscious.’
    ‘Well, the poem is familiar,’ I confessed. Marty would have recognised it too. He was only reading my original and much classier version last night while I made him coffee—after finally convincing me to go to an extended-hours X-ray clinic for my ankle, and of course the Monaro refused to start after so long stuck in the garage, so he’d driven me himself, hence the coffee afterwards, and I suppose it must have been sometime then that he slipped the fateful muffins into my toaster. But if he’d written his own crass version of that poem later that night—or felt the need for alcohol or sleepers—then he left my apartment feeling more miserable than he’d looked. Even so, I could think of at least two ways it would have been my fault. Worse still, if Symes considered this evidence to be the ‘clincher’ then he was revealing only a fraction of what he knew.
    ‘Since you were poking around my apartment,’ I said just a little too sharply, ‘you might remember it too. You can’t miss it. It’s framed near my TV with two other favourites andRoger’s photo. It goes: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height and …” there’s more, obviously, but you get the picture.’
    ‘Poems are often defined by their punchlines,’ Moser said with an unexpected spark of intelligence. ‘Can you remember what that is?’
    I could, but I didn’t want to say it now. Unfortunately, I suspected they already knew, or else they’d find out soon enough. I’d downloaded the poem for free off the internet.
    ‘It says: “I shall but love thee better after death,”’ Moser said.
    Symes glanced knowingly to Moser, then winked at me. ‘Spank me if that’s not creepy.’
    ‘She’s safe!’ Death insisted. ‘Marty’s harmless. His first wife took his spine, the second broke his heart and the third still returns regularly to plunder his wallet—even last week! Listen, I’d wait for one, or all three, of those witches to disappear before I’d suspect
him
of dark deeds!’
    ‘I didn’t know any of that,’ I said with a deepening respect for both Marty and Death. ‘But I do know the last three words
before
the last line, Mr Symes: “if God choose”.
If God choose
,’ I repeated with emphasis. ‘Surely a killer wouldn’t leave his killing to God, or