Mr. Murder Read Online Free PDF

and took an almost catlike pleasure in the grooming.
        The contrasting halves of their shared room attested to other differences between the sisters. Charlotte liked posters full of motion, colorful hot-air balloons against a desert twilight, a ballet dancer in mid-entrechat, sprinting gazelles. Emily preferred posters of autumn leaves, evergreens hung with heavy snow, and moonlight-silvered surf breaking on a pale beach. Charlotte's bedspread was green, red, and yellow, Emily's was a beige chenille.
        Disorder ruled in Charlotte's domain, while Emily prized neatness.
        Then there was the matter of pets. On Charlotte's side of the room, built-in bookshelves housed the terrarium that was home to Fred the Turtle, the wide-mouthed gallon jar where Bob the Bug made his home in dead leaves and grass, the cage that housed Wayne the Gerbil, another terrarium in which Sheldon the Snake was the tenant, a second cage in which Whiskers the Mouse spent a lot of time keeping an eye on Sheldon in spite of the glass and wire that separated them, and a final terrarium occupied by Loretta the Chameleon.
        Charlotte had rejected the suggestion that a kitten or puppy was a more appropriate pet. "Dogs and cats run around loose all the time, you can't keep them in a nice safe little home and protect them," she explained.
        Emily had only one pet. Its name was Peepers. It was a stone the size of a small lemon, smoothed by decades of running water in the Sierra creek from which she had retrieved it during their summer vacation a year ago. She had painted two soulful eyes on it, and insisted,
        "Peepers is the best pet of all. I don't have to feed him or clean up after him. He's been around forever, so he's real smart and real wise, and when I'm sad or maybe mad, I just tell him what I'm hurting about, and he takes it all in and worries about it so I don't have to think about it any more and can be happy."
        Emily was capable of expressing ideas that were, on the surface, entirely childlike but, on reflection, seemed deeper and more mature than anything expected from a seven-year-old. Sometimes, when he looked into her dark eyes, Marty felt she was seven going on four hundred, and he could hardly wait to see just how interesting and complex she was going to be when she was all grown-up.
        After their hair was brushed, the girls climbed into the twin beds, and their mother tucked the covers around them, kissed them, and wished them sweet dreams. "Don't let the bed bugs bite," she warned Emily because the line always elicited a giggle.
        As Paige retreated to the doorway, Marty moved a straightbacked chair from its usual place against the wall and positioned it at the foot of-and exactly between-the two beds. Except for a miniature battery-powered reading lamp clipped to his open notebook and a low-wattage Mickey Mouse luminaria plugged into a wall socket near the floor, he switched off all the lights. He sat in the chair, held the notebook at reading distance, and waited until the silence had acquired that same quality of pleasurable expectation that filled a theater in the moment when the curtain started to rise.
        The mood was set.
        This was the happiest part of Marty's day. Story time. No matter what else might happen after rising to meet the morning, he could always look forward to story time.
        He wrote the tales himself in a notebook labeled Stories for Charlotte and Emily, which he might actually publish one day. Or might not.
        Every word was a gift to his daughters, so the decision to share the stories with anyone else would be entirely theirs.
        Tonight marked the beginning of a special treat, a story in verse, which would continue through Christmas Day. Maybe it would go well enough to help him forget the unsettling events in his office.
        "Well, now Thanksgiving is safely past, more turkey eaten this year than last-' "It rhymes!"