Mallets Aforethought Read Online Free PDF Page A

whiz at it, too; big clients and bigger commissions. Let the rest have their fifteen minutes of fame on the financial networks, touting stocks they owned and barking at competitors like a company of trained seals. I was the real deal and publicity was the last thing I wanted or needed.
    But the money business had changed and so had the city, and probably so had I. Looking back on it now it seems so impossible that I could have stayed, it’s hard to come up with one reason, a single motivating factor for my departure.
    Bottom line, I just needed a planet with air on it.
     
Chapter 2
     
    Out in my driveway, George’s truck sat stubbornly refusing to start. No surprise; the old vehicle was so unreliable that none of the rest of us would drive it at all if we didn’t have to. This time I poured a thin stream of gasoline from a Big Gulp cup straight into the carburetor while he turned the key—kids, don’t try this at home—and he got it going.
    “Meet me?” he called to Will Bonnet through a cloud of blue exhaust and a rumble of rotting muffler.
    At the Mobil station, he meant. The truck spent more time on their repair lot lately than it did on the road. But he couldn’t afford to replace it so he kept it going with rebuilt parts.
    Will waved agreement and headed for his aunt’s house to get her car, itself only recently returned to running condition. In a muddled try at maintenance (and a sad one; not long ago she’d been the sort of person who rotated her own tires), Agnes had put melted bacon grease into the crankcase instead of motor oil.
    Once they’d departed I got on the phone. Soon I was telling a Maine State Trooper what Ellie and I had found, and where.
    “People aren’t in there gawking at it, poking at it with a stick or anything, are they?” he wanted to know.
    From which I deduced Trooper Hollis Colgate’s opinion of the general public. But I held my tongue, merely saying that I didn’t think anyone else would be visiting Harlequin House today; the other volunteers in the fix-up project were too sensible to brave the weather. Then I let the other shoe drop.
    “Listen, there are actually two bodies in there. Gosling’s, and another one from a long time ago.”
    A silence. Then, “How long?”
    I told him, adding what I knew about the deceased’s probable identity but not mentioning anything else about it.
    Such as the fact that it had a small hole in its head, above its right eyebrow. Ellie hadn’t noticed.
    “So maybe this Gosling guy might’ve found it first and the shock got to him?” Colgate said. “You happen to know if he had a condition, might account for his passing away so suddenly?”
    No, I felt like retorting, and I especially didn’t know of any that would’ve enabled him to walk through a wall, then end up stiff as a board and wearing a grin out of your darkest nightmares.
    “You would,” I told the policeman mildly, “have to check into Hector’s medical history for that.”
    “Yeah.” Still hoping he didn’t really have to rush up here, sixty miles on winding two-lane Route 1 in a storm. I could hear it in his voice so I described Hector’s body in further detail.
    His tone turning crisp, he asked only a few more questions before promising to arrive within the hour; by the time I hung up I was convinced at least that Trooper Hollis Colgate was nobody’s fool.
    But whether that turned out to be good news or bad news only time would tell. Sitting in the phone alcove I watched the panes of the big old double-hung windows in the dining room get battered by the rain. The caulk beads I’d run atop the storm windows were holding, so the window wells weren’t filling with water.
    Not yet, anyway. Next summer, I mused, I would remove all the aluminum storm-window frames and grind the trim down to bright unweathered wood. After that maybe it would hold paint, which it hadn’t the last time, peeling away in thick strips almost before I finished applying it. But back then