No Way to Kill a Lady Read Online Free PDF

saying she needed a bathroom and since she’d never been on the upper floors, she intended to have a look around. Aunt Madeleine always had guests staying up there—­special guests that we children weren’t to disturb.
    I shared Emma’s curiosity, but I had another exploration in mind.
    It was the past that called to me. I slipped away from the others and headed for the study, where I remembered Madeleine spending most of her time. She liked a small, ladylike library off the breakfast room. Paneled with handsome shelves and featuring pink wallpaper, it also had an elaborate plaster ceiling depicting long-­tailed griffons that menaced cherubs who peeped out from behind the protection of delicately rendered seashells.
    I opened the door and paused.
    Although the sun glowed rather meagerly through the streaked glass of the windows and motes of dust floated in the air like moths, I could almost see Madeleine sitting tall and elegant at the delicate curved desk. She might be writing letters in her perfectly slanted hand or studying glossy catalogs from the New York auction houses, holding a magnifying glass to examine details of the photographs. On one corner of her desk she kept the bust of some poet or other—­a man with curly hair and his shirt open to his chest, although often he wore a paper hat she folded out of stationery. I remembered how she used to play her fingers idly on the statue as she spoke on her white telephone to arrange social engagements.
    For all her reputation as Madcap Maddy, though, I remembered her more as a fearsome aunt who fixed me with a stern eye if I dared interrupt her. In my mind, she wore a dramatic black robe tied at the waist and loosened at the bust. She was vain about her figure—­and rightly so. She had been slim, but shapely. And of course her hands always seemed weighted down by the gigantic jeweled rings she liked to wear. Surely at least one had come from a husband, but the others I assumed she had bought for herself. She hadn’t been the kind of woman to wait for anyone to give her the things she wanted.
    â€œTo what do I owe this interruption?” she asked me one morning when I lurked timidly outside her study doorway while she finished speaking on the phone. She set the receiver down sharply.
    I was about ten at the time, and I had been afraid to answer her. But finally I edged into the room and held out the broken pieces of a Meissen sugar bowl. “Miss Pippi said to bring this to you.”
    â€œTea and crumpets?” Madeleine did not look up from the ledger book in which she was writing a notation.
    â€œNo. We were setting the table for lunch,” I whispered. “I bumped the sugar bowl onto the floor. It—­it broke. I’m very sorry.”
    â€œSorry?” Madeleine glanced up from her work at last and fixed me with a midnight blue gaze. “Did you break it on purpose?”
    â€œN-­no, Aunt Madeleine.”
    â€œThen you should apologize for your clumsiness, but not be sorry. Sorry is a foolish sort of feeling, don’t you think?”
    At ten, I didn’t know what to think.
    â€œIt’s Pippi who should be sorry,” Madeleine went on, “for conscripting children to do her work. She’s supposed to be a socialist, after all. Here, drop those pieces into the trash.” She tapped the toe of her mule against the leather bucket at her feet.
    â€œOh, we offered to help Pippi,” I said in a rush, anxious to spare the housekeeper who shared cookies with us at her pantry table.
    â€œWe?” Madeleine repeated, sounding amused. “Who’s we? You and your sisters?”
    â€œJust Libby.” I obeyed my aunt by letting the shell-­like fragments of china fall through my fingers and into the bucket. Then I hid my hands behind my back lest they give away some other transgression she could criticize. “Libby was helping. Emma’s too little.”
    â€œI