Pouncing on Murder Read Online Free PDF

through books, at least somethingthat would lighten whatever load they were carrying, because we were all carrying burdens of some kind.
    What Henry’s load had been, though, I didn’t know. The only personal things I knew about him were his book choices, that he was a widower, and that none of his children lived in the state. Also that he tended to avoid conversation, most often preferring grunting and shaking his head whenever those could pass as communication.
    I sighed, thinking about the exquisite maple syrup that Henry had given Julia and me the last time he was on the bookmobile. “Phyllis said he’d been out at his sugar shack.” I put my hand on Eddie’s warm back to feel his quiet reverberations. “He’d finished boiling sap and was cleaning up.”
    Last year I’d ventured out to a state park to watch a maple syrup cooking demonstration. Add maple sap to a large pan over a fire, boil, add more sap, boil. Add more firewood, add more sap. Repeat until the liquid turned into maple syrup, which was when it reached just above two hundred and nineteen degrees.
    I’d happened to mention my park trip to Henry, and over the next few months, he’d dribbled out a lot of maple syrup–making information. For example, I now knew the large commercial operations had complicated systems of tubes that ran from the trees to large storage vats and fancy machines that processed the sap into syrup. I knew that Henry was old-school—no surprise there—and hauled his sap from the trees in buckets. I also knew that he cooked his sap in a massive and ancient pan that he’d inherited from his father, and I knew that he sortedhis firewood by age and that he considered firewood stacking to be a fine art.
    “Poor Henry,” I whispered, pulling Eddie close to my chest and hugging him tight. For a change, instead of struggling to get away, my cat let me snuggle him close.
    And never stopped purring.
    •   •   •
    The next day, I risked life and limb by venturing into the restaurant owned and run by my best friend. Kristen Jurek was, physically, my complete opposite. Tall, where I was efficient. Blond and straight hair to my black and curly. She also had the easy grace of the natural athlete, while I had to practice the simplest activity over and over again before I got the hang of it, and she was so used to the admiring stares of men that she didn’t even notice them. If a man stared at me, my first reaction was to wonder what food was stuck in my teeth.
    I banged on the back door of the Three Seasons, using the same triple-knock pattern I’d used since we met, the summer we were twelve. We’d encountered each other on Chilson’s city beach and, over cones of mint chocolate chip ice cream, had started a friendship that had endured time, distance, and even living in the same town seven months out of the year. Kristen closed down her restaurant just before winter—hence the restaurant’s name—and spent the snowy months in Key West, tending bar on the weekends and doing as little as possible during the week.
    She’d recently returned to Chilson and had immediately jumped into restaurant-readying preparations. Formost people, the weeks before the summer season were a time of happy anticipation. Not for Kristen.
    “Hey,” I called, shutting the door behind me. “Are you here?”
    A metallic crash, following by a sailor-quality curse, was answer enough.
    Smiling, I picked my way around stacks of boxes and went straight to the kitchen, where a deeply tanned Kristen, with her hands on her hips, was staring at a large pan on one of the many gas burners. “I hate that pan,” she said. “I’ve always hated it.”
    “Then get rid of it,” I said, pulling a stool up to the work counter crowded with cooking and serving items, half of which I couldn’t identify.
    “Can’t. Paid way too much money for the dang thing.”
    I could see how that would be a problem. “Has Scruffy touched it?” I asked. “Sell it on