Mother Finds a Body Read Online Free PDF

intentions of surprising him as Mother suggested, but it was a difficult subject to bring up. We hadn’t been married long enough for me to say, “Look, dear, Mother did the damnedest thing. She set fire to the woods so she could bury the body.”
    As far as that goes, we hadn’t been married at all. Not if you want to be technical about it. We had a deep-sea captain say the right words, and I wore the ring on the right finger, but since the night of our marriage we hadn’t been alone for five minutes.
    It wasn’t only Mother and our guests. Even before they joined us, the studio had sent a publicity man as chaperone until we went through another ceremony that would sound legal to the Hays office. They didn’t like the water-taxi business. They didn’t like the idea of our captain being willing to disregard the technicalities of a marriage license, and they didn’t like me particularly to start with. Making a movie actress out of a burlesque queen was a tougher job than they had anticipated.
    Hays organization or no Hays organization, I had no intentions of spoiling my romantic marriage. My father had been married at sea; my grandfather had been married at sea, and I had an uncle who married himself at sea. I was being traditional, and if they wanted to call it living in sin, it was all right with me. One thing sure: they weren’t going to get me to wear a white veil and have doves flying around while an organ played bad music. I wasn’t exactly suspended by my studio, but I was too close to it for comfort. I knew I could always go back to burlesque.
    â€œPunkin?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWhat were you thinking about?”
    â€œHonest? Or can I color it a little?”
    â€œHonest,” Biff said.
    â€œI was thinking if this is living in sin it sure is overrated.”
    When Biff smiles he’s rather handsome. He smiled then, anextra-nice smile. He got up and dropped an eggshell into the coffeepot, and I thought he looked substantial, standing there in the early-morning sunlight.
    He’s a little too tall, six feet four, and because he’s always been conscious of his height, he stoops. Just in the knees, though. Most people think he stoops because it gets a laugh on his theater entrances, but that isn’t true. His hair is dark and, with the exception of one lock that stands straight up in the back, it’s wavy. His eyes are a real Irish blue, almost black when he’s angry, and I like his mouth. It’s big, but, like Mother says, a big mouth is a sign of generosity. She doesn’t say that about Biff’s mouth, of course. On him a big mouth means deceit. If he’d been anything but an actor he could have gotten away with no mouth at all, but Mother doesn’t like actors. Least of all she likes burlesque actors.
    â€œHaving fun?” he asked me.
    â€œUh-huh. Best honeymoon I ever had.”
    Biff placed the cups on the table. He looked closely at one and began polishing it with Mother’s asthma towel. “Mandy’s getting damn careless with his dishwashing,” he said.
    â€œWell, at least he tries,” I said. “That’s more than I can say for that Corny friend of yours. Do you know he wasn’t even around last night when that fire was . . .”
    The car driving up interrupted me. With a screeching of brakes it stopped a few feet from the table. It was our car, and Corny scrambled out of the backseat. His pajamas were wrinkled, but I was glad to see he had on the bottoms even if they didn’t match the tops. His eyes were bleary. I glared at him as he staggered over to the table and reached for the bottle of Wilson’s.
    â€œI’ll have one of those brown boys,” he said.
    â€œYou’ve had enough brown boys to populate South Africa,” I snapped, taking the bottle from his hand. “Go to bed and sleep it off. On the floor for once.”
    Corny didn’t move. He glowered