Paradise County Read Online Free PDF

said, all of them, the coroner and the lawyers and the police and all the other officials who’d been called in to give their verdict on the death of such a wealthy and prominent man. She’d read the autopsy report, seen the pictures, pored over everything, tried to learn any little detail she could about her father’s final minutes, hoping to understand, to salve her grief with knowledge. Nothing she had found had contradicted the ruling of suicide. But she still found it impossible to believe.
    But then, everything that had happened over the past five weeks was impossible to believe. Like Alice, she seemed to have stepped through the looking glass. What existed on the other side was an alternate universe to the life she had known.
    The boy was back in the doorway again, his gaze fixed on her, his expression openly curious. A man stood behind him, a head and more taller than the boy, a hand on the boy’s shoulder, his eyes narrowed as he watched Alex approach. The wintry sun was at her back, and she assumed his frowning, squinty-eyed expression was the result of staring into it, and not because of anything to do with her. He conformed to the general description she’d been given—a big man, tall, black-haired, late thirties—and she guessed that he must be Joe Welch, the farm manager. Her farm manager, now that her father was gone. Alex’s informant was Whistledown’s longtime housekeeper, Inez Johnson, who had also described Joe Welch enthusiastically as “dead sexy.”
    If he was, Alex was in no state to recognize it. Like her ability to enjoy food and sleep, her ability to enjoy sex, or even the infinitesimal pleasure of recognizing and responding to a sexy man, had been stolen away by grief. Oh, she could see that this man was handsome enough, with a strong-featured, square-jawed face rendered even more formidably masculine by what looked like a couple of days’ worth of black stubble, but she did not feel the little tingle of male-female awareness that once would have told her that he was attractive. He was simply a tall man in a blindingly blue goose-down parka that made him look massive through the shoulders and torso, with narrow hips and long, muscular legs encased in faded jeans.
    At least the parka was bright enough not to fade to gray like everything else in her line of vision. Fixing on it like a homing beacon, Alex headed toward it, placing her feet carefully on the pavement which she feared, from the temperature of the air and the icy frosting on the grass and pond, might be slick.
    He remained unsmiling as he watched her approach, and Alex wondered if he knew who she was—and why she was there.
    Probably not. Her father’s death had made all the major newspapers’ financial pages, along with reports that he had killed himself because of a cataclysmic business reversal. But there had been no pictures of her or any other family member, and barely any mention of them, either.
    Strange to think that it took no more than a small rise in interest rates, a few bad investments, and a suicide, and it was gone, all gone, a billion-dollar empire fallen in upon itself like a house of cards. Bankruptcy was such a hideous word. She had never, ever thought it would apply to her family, or their business. Haywood Harley Nichols, her father’s wholly-owned health-care firm, had been building hospitals and nursing homes and HMO’s all over the world for almost half a century. But her father’s lawyers—no, her lawyers now—informed her that if they were lucky and were able to sell everything for a decent price, there might be just enough to pay all her father’s debts, with a little left over.
    If not, bankruptcy seemed the only other option. Which would leave nothing at all for herself, her sister, and her current stepmother, as her father’s heirs, to divide. Mercedes, her father’s sixth wife and his widow, had been having serial hysterics at the prospect of impending poverty since learning the truth