Pleasantly Dead Read Online Free PDF

the drawer a kick. Why couldn’t the chap have been murdered in the woods, preferably on Crown land where the body could moulder away until the hunters found it in the fall?
    “Mr. Rudley.”
    That damned detective again.
    “You have a Mr. Leslie booked into the Birches cottage.”
    “He just checked in.”
    “I’m confused. You said your wife was staying there.”
    “Mr. Leslie is staying at the Low Birches. Margaret is at the High Birches.”
    Brisbois forehead crimped.
    “The Low Birches is the last cottage on the left. The High Birches is directly behind the inn. On the rise. That’s why it’s called the High Birches.”
    “Now’s as good a time as any to interview your wife, I suppose.”
    “Lucky her.”
    “I presume she’s in.”
    “She might be. Or she could be in the village, consoling her friend the flower lady.” Rudley shoved the telephone aside. “Of course, she could be damned near anywhere.”
    Brisbois left, shaking his head. Rudley returned to the business of checking reservations. Confirming names and dates against deposits, he found he had to keep going back over the ledgers. The laughter from the veranda was giving him a headache.
    “What in hell is wrong with people these days?” he said as he flubbed a set of figures. “A man was murdered yards away and they’re laughing.” So what if they didn’t know the son of a bitch? He shoved the ledger under the counter, pulled out a bottle of scotch and a tumbler, and poured two fingers. A token half-day of silence seemed appropriate. He was the kind of man who stopped his car and removed his hat when a funeral procession passed. And although he was vexed at this stranger for dying in his wine cellar and ruining the start of the summer season, he felt every life deserved a modicum of respect. “Hell,” he said as Tiffany crossed the lobby with a stack of towels, “it has to do with our basic humanity.” For the same reason, he grudgingly opposed the death penalty. “It makes us all murderers,” he said.
    Tiffany turned, wild-eyed. “What did you say, Mr. Rudley?”
    “It turns us all into murderers,” he said. “The damned death penalty.”
    “Yes, sir.” She hurried on.
    The laughter on the veranda trickled into the dining room as Gregoire rang the bell for lunch. Leo George thundered up the steps and into the lobby as the clock struck twelve.
    “It’s like opening a can of dog food,” Rudley muttered as Mrs. Phipps-Walker weaved down the stairs, checking her watch.
    Geraldine Phipps-Walker had been coming to the Pleasant for forty-five years, beginning when Mr. MacIntyre was the proprietor. The rumour was she had had an affair with a lake guide, an assignation she renewed every summer for five years. The affair ended when the guide fell through the ice one winter and drowned. After a season of mourning, she married Norman Phipps-Walker and brought him here every year. Geraldine was a dedicated ornithologist. She declared that the blue herons at the Pleasant were the truest to form she had ever encountered. She dressed sensibly and carried binoculars and a small camera around her neck on a leather thong. Mrs. Phipps-Walker arrived at the bottom of the stairs, went to the door, scanned the lake, nodded, and went on into the dining room.
    Rudley knew what the nod meant. Mrs. Phipps-Walker had spotted Norman paddling toward the inn. He had come off the lake for breakfast and gone back out the moment Brisbois released him. Norman had had little to tell. He had awakened Garrett Thomas at four, as arranged. At four-fifteen, they stopped by the kitchen to pick up a thermos of coffee. They had got their boats, which had been tied up at the dock the night before, and headed out to the shoals.
    Norman secured the boat and headed toward the inn with his fishing rod and pillow.
    “No luck?” Rudley asked as Norman entered the lobby.
    “They’re not biting today.”
    “Thomas brought in a dandy this morning.”
    Norman grimaced.