Lucy and the Valentine Verdict Read Online Free PDF

record, was lying on the table and nowhere
near his eye.
    “Yes, yes, we did chat briefly outside. An
attractive woman and all that. Who am I to let an opportunity pass
me by? Especially with it being Valentine’s and all that.” He
motioned with his knife toward the centerpiece, a rather gaudy
creation of red silk roses and paper cupids blithely shooting each
other in head and ass.
    My dining companion, the dead Mrs. Peabody,
snorted. Miss Brent pursed her lips and shook her head in a
thoroughly disapproving manner.
    “She did say she was from Boston, didn’t
she?” Miss Claythorne asked. “Isn’t that where you said you are
from too?”
    Mr. Blore took a loud sip of his wine. “Big
town, Boston.”
    Sir Arthur cleared his throat. “Boston, eh?
Lady York goes down there often herself. Sees a... what is it...
dear?” He glanced at his wife.
    She smiled, serene. “Chiropractor.”
    There was silence at the table as everyone
scribbled in their notebooks. Well, everyone except Peter. He took
a bite of his steak and smiled.
    I took a bite of mine too and frowned. It
was obvious Mr. Blore and possibly Emily Brent were being set up as
having motives. Blore for some connection from their shared city,
and Emily Brent for some real or perceived religious wrong-doing.
There was Lady York, too, with her chiropractor... And what about
everything Mrs. Peabody had practically yelled out right before her
demise?
    I opened my mouth to ask if anyone else had
thoughts on her comments, but was cut off by an elbow to the side.
“Seen but not heard...” Mrs. Peabody’s ghost reminded me.
    I sighed and made a note to see what “sins”
of the fictional Mrs. Peabody I could uncover. I glanced at her
“body,” wondering if she had any information, but she was busy
chatting with Mandrake and not about anything to do with her
murder.
    Mandrake cut into his steak. “We met in
college. We were both in Big Brothers and Sisters.”
    Mrs. Peabody dipped her finger into a bowl
of horseradish sauce that had been left on the table for all of us
to share. She made a face and then replied, “Oh?”
    “I did it for my resumé,” he confided. “But
it’s important to Michelle.”
    Vera Claythorne to me, I assumed.
    I smiled and tried to look interested, while
also giving subtle hints that I really wanted to instead be
listening to the conversation going on at the main table.
    Miss Claythorne, she of the Big Brothers and
Sisters, stared down at her lap, where I detected a glow... a
phone, I realized.
    I glanced at Lady York, wondering how our
hostess would react to this anachronism in her jazz-era dinner.
    Miss Claythorne, however, flipped her phone
over face down on her lap, hiding its glow with Lady York being
none the wiser, at least for now.
    “So,” she asked. “How long have you all been
here?”
    Her question caused our hosts to turn their
heads her direction. At first I thought it was because the question
was directed at them, but I quickly realized it was because Vera
Claythorne, like Mrs. Peabody, had gone off script.
    Sir Arthur opened his mouth to answer, but
Lady York beat him to it. “My husband’s family has lived on this
property for 400 hundred years.”
    Since Sir Arthur did not look Native
American in the slightest, I had to assume that Lady York was
guiding the conversation back to the land of make believe.
    “That is a very long time,” Miss Claythorne
replied, her gaze remaining on Sir Arthur.
    “Yes. It is.”
    The lights clicked back on, catching Lady
York in a disapproving stare, meant, I was sure, to knock the
younger woman back into place. Or maybe, since she couldn’t have
known her expression was going to be so apparent, just a natural
reaction to the younger woman’s refusal to stay on script.
    Either way, the return of the lights seemed
the signal to kick off another stage of our evening.
    Lady York smiled and made some comment about
timing. Then she waved her hand in the air, signaling, as it