Last Look Read Online Free PDF Page B

“You’re not the only one in the neighborhood who can put two and two together and get four, eh?”
    “Anytime you want a job with the FBI, Mr. Genzano, you give me a call. I’ll put in a good word for you with my boss.”
    “If I thought they’d give me one of those glockenspiel guns, I might consider it. I used to be quite the shot, you know, back in Double-u Double-u Two.”
    Dorsey laughed. “You just say the word, Mr. Genzano. The Bureau can always use a good man.”
    Mr. Genzano chuckled, then coughed. “Asthma. Gonna be the death of me. Gotta get back inside and outta the yard. Pollen everywhere.”
    He shook his head and turned toward his house. “You tell your father to give me a call when he gets home, hear? We’re going to need to do something about that old maple out back. Split in half and ready to fall…”
    He continued to talk as he returned to his own yard and up his back steps. Dorsey waited until he opened the back door, then waved. The old man waved back, and she sighed with relief that he hadn’t gone into respiratory failure right there in the driveway.
    Dorsey crossed the street and opened the driver’s side door, leaning against the car momentarily, looking back at her father’s house. The last place they’d all lived together as a family—it held so many memories. She turned away abruptly and got into the car.
    She checked her voice mail, then turned the key in the ignition. There was no point in returning to the airport. The beach house was less than three hours away. She might as well just drive down and see what her father was up to.
    Had he already heard the news?
    Part of her almost hoped he had, so she wouldn’t have to be the one to tell him.
    She dialed his number again. This time she left a message. “Pop, I’m on my way down to the beach house. We need to talk. I should be there in a few hours.”
             
    The drive to Hathaway Beach took longer than Dorsey had expected, due to road construction on Route 1 just south of Dover, then again on Route 36 going toward Slaughter Beach on the Delaware Bay. Hathaway sat midway between Slaughter and the Old Mispillion Lighthouse, at the end of a road that was newly paved. Dorsey could remember a time when the road was mostly sand and dirt going down to the beach, back before the old Delaware fishing towns had been discovered. Twenty years ago, when Dorsey’s grandmother had considered putting the house on the market, she could barely have given it away. Now, local realtors stuffed the mailbox with solicitations, dying to market the old place to the people driving by who’d love to call it theirs.
    Well, it was a pretty fine house, Dorsey reflected as she parked at the end of the drive behind her Dad’s dark blue Explorer. Built in the late 1890s by her maternal great-grandfather, James Mills, the old clapboard Victorian stood tall and stately and tightly laced as a spinster, all by itself on a large lot smack in the center of Hathaway. Behind the house stood the remnants of the old carriage house, which her father insisted he would someday renovate, and the remains of her grandmother’s gardens, in which neither she nor her father had any interest.
    The grass in the front yard grew in tufts through the yellow sand, and three old pines along the side of the house leaned westward, as if exhausted from having stood against the wind off the bay for so many years. Across the street, two more houses from the same era sat on either side of a large square building of block construction that dated from the 1960s. The newer structure housed not only the small two-room post office, but the general store, a luncheonette—the town’s only dining spot—and a newsstand as well.
    Dorsey climbed the five steps up to the freshly painted front porch and pulled the screen door open. The inner door stood ajar and she called to her father as she walked through the downstairs and out the back door, which was unlocked as well.
    She