No Place Like Home - A Camilla Randall Mystery (The Camilla Randall Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Sharkov in the past tense. He must have died in the fire. I shuddered. How awful to be burned in your own home. The one place you ought to be able to feel safe.
    I'd felt so safe in this little cottage. Where was I going to find a home if Silas sold this property? Rents on the California coast were almost as high as New York, and wages were much lower. What would I do? Bookstores were closing everywhere. I had no family—only an alcoholic ex-husband, last seen in one of the seedier watering holes of Southeast Asia.
    Plant and Silas were my family now. And they were about to go through hell.
    I wished I could do something, instead of being one more burden for them to worry about.
    I turned off my laptop without bothering to check my email—I hardly ever got anything more than spam these days. But I did have to deal with the snail mail—at least the bills and stuff for the store. I poured myself a glass of chardonnay from the bottle Plant and Silas had left in the fridge, and attacked the stack of envelopes while my Lean Cuisine heated in the microwave.
    And there it was—the notice of insufficient funds from my bank. Even though I'd sort of expected it after Brianna's note, my stomach gave a thunk. I'd only just paid off the debts I'd incurred with my mother's medical bills and funeral expenses, and here I was flung into financial Hades again.
    I checked the Lean Cuisine and went back to the fridge for the wine bottle.
    Stuck to the fridge, I saw a note from Plant I'd missed before.
    "Reminder: Chanticleer at the Mission tomorrow night. We meet George and Enrique at Novo for early dinner. 5:30."
    The concert. We'd been looking forward to it for months—San Francisco's glorious a cappella men's choir singing in SLO's eighteenth-century mission. And a nice dinner first with Silas's friends George and Enrique, the couple who had talked Silas and Plant into finally tying the knot.
    But now the thought of spending tomorrow evening with Silas and Plant and their happily married friends filled me with nothing but dread.

Chapter 13—Burning Jacuzzis
     
     
     
    Doria sat in silence as Mr. Sanchez wove expertly through the traffic and zoomed onto the freeway. The sight of a Silverstone Ferrari Spyder like Harry's brought her another wave of grief.
    Harry. Dead.
    It didn't make sense.
    Neither did that phone call from Mistress Nightshade. Even if it hadn't been a hallucination, it defied logic. For one thing, he/she said Harry thought the Jacuzzi would be a good place to wait out the fire.
    But Harry would never do that.
    He'd lost his friend Spuds Ryan in a wildfire that swept through the Santa Barbara hills a couple of years before. Spuds had tried to take refuge in his Jacuzzi. The water boiled away and his remains were charred beyond recognition. The funeral had been gruesome.
    Doria could believe there was something funny going on with Harry's money. His complicated tax sheltering had always made her nervous, and she knew he'd been getting insider tips that might annoy the SEC. And he'd said something last week about how his new boat company had triggered an investigation by some federal bureau or other.
    She'd been terrified he'd end up in jail like poor Martha Stewart.
    But dead? Burned up in a Jacuzzi like Spuds? Nothing about the story felt true.
    The city was zooming by. Because Doria had spent her childhood in a gritty New England mill town, Los Angeles had never seemed quite real to her—all those lollypop palm trees looking so stark against an impossibly blue sky.
    Part of her wanted to believe none of it was real.
    She tried to tell herself maybe it wasn't. Maybe she was still in the hospital—and her subconscious was inventing this because she'd been dreading the trip up to the Central Coast.
    She'd been apprehensive about being alone with Harry. He'd been having such crazy mood swings and strange silences. Their relationship had been strained ever since she moved back to New York and he stayed on the West Coast.