In the Worst Way (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book 5) Read Online Free PDF Page A

laid down on the floor and scooted under the bed. The names were still there, printed in Stella’s handwriting on a yellowing label and pasted to the side rail. The Wahle family. It was their furniture that I lived with and slept on. I didn’t know what had happened to them after Stella took possession of their things in 1939 and I didn’t want to know. They hadn’t come to claim what belonged to them and that was more information than I wanted. Was it something that belonged to the Wahle family that The Klinefeld Group wanted?  
    I touched the label and knew that I was going to find out and it would bring no peace. Chuck wasn’t there to help. It was just me. What if this had to do with my parents? My godmothers had given them our house and it was an extraordinary gift. Something had happened to make them do it and I’d been searching for the reason ever since I found out. Dad had flown to Paris with Josiah Bled, The Girls’ uncle, the year before I was born and the old man had never been seen again. While Dad was gone The Girls’ signed over our house’s deed to my mom, a woman they’d never met.  
    The weight of those names, the break-in, the possibilities of what my parents had done to earn our house settled on my chest, pressing me into the thick Turkish carpet. I was about to wallow and there was only one thing to do when wallowing came to call; I had to make a salad or tofu or a salad with tofu, the ultimate cure.  
    I wiped a tear from the corner of my eye and heard my door creak open wide. Pick’s fluffy feet scampered in and he followed my trail to the bed, got down, and belly crawled to me. His red tongue flicked out and touched my cheek.  
    “It doesn’t help but thank you,” I said, scratching him under his chin.  
    Beyond his panting head, a pair of pearl grey Prada pumps walked in, circled the bed, and then found a place at the Wahles’ rocker next to the full-length mirror.  
    “Don’t let them haunt you, dear,” said Myrtle. “They will if you allow it.”
    I bit my lip and then said, “Who?”  
    “The Wahles. You shouldn’t be under there. They’ll take you to places you shouldn’t go.”  
    Pick sniffed the label and I pushed his snout down in case he smeared the old ink. “And where would that be?”  
    “Darkness.”  
    “You know that?”  
    She sighed, a sad and lonely sound. “I spent my life with these names surrounding me, weighing on me. My parents searched for the Wahles and when they died it fell to Millicent and myself.”  
    “But you never found any trace,” I said.  
    “Oh, no. We picked up the trail in 1986.”  
    I jumped and bumped my head on the slats. “So they’re dead.”  
    “I said I found the trail, not the end of it. Millicent and I found many clues over the years, but none led us to their fate.”  
    “What clues?”  
    “We found a man, who was eleven in 1939. He remembered the SS coming for the Wahles in the middle of the night in Hallstatt. He was reluctant to speak of it. His shame was deep.”  
    “He was a child.”  
    “His parents weren’t. They watched their friends being dragged out of their house and thrown in the back of a truck and didn’t lift a finger. He never saw the Wahles again. It was our first clue. It took six years to find another.”
    My heart was pounding. They found a clue about the Wahles the year before I was born, the year Dad and Josiah Bled flew to Paris and took the train to Hallstat, the Wahles’ hometown. “And what was that.”  
    “No,” she said, her voice sharper than I’d ever heard it.  
    “No?” I whispered.  
    “It’s too hard.”
    “You’ve given up?”  
    “Never and, in the future, the same will be expected of you.”  
    “Of me?”  
    “Naturally.”
    A pair of Italian loafers walked in and Dad said, “There you are.”  
    Dammit, Dad. Go away.
    He leaned over and peered at me in the gloom under the bed. “What’re you doing under there?”  
    “What do