Seven Kinds of Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

she’s a nut. Your pal Tootles has a knack for nuts.”
    Constance opened another envelope, a bill, and he said, “Anyway, her husband was making passes at you right in front of me. Now is that a kook or isn’t it?”
    Constance ignored him. She crossed the kitchen to throw away the junk mail and envelopes.
    “And you know damn well Tootles was making passes at me. You thought it was funny!” He had been indignant.
    Constance was heading toward the hall. She paused. “Maybe she wanted to see what kind of equipment a fireman had. I did marry a fireman, you know.”
    “And was it a terrible waste?”
    She walked from the room carrying her mail and the bill with her. Charlie was grinning again when he went back to the fishing-gear catalogue. Later, he knew if she had phrased the question differently, he would have said sure, let’s do it. The way you ask a question is important, he would have said. There was no doubt that he didn’t want to go, and that was the question she had asked, after all. A yes or no answer was required, and a yes would have been a lie. If she had said she wanted to go, he would have agreed without question, maybe with a few jabs at Tootles, but without real argument. If she had brought it up again in any way, he would have said he had intended to go with her all along, just teasing a little that morning. If she had left the invitation lying about, he would have picked it up and said something like Why not? None of those things happened, and neither of them mentioned Tootles or Babar again until two weeks later when he found Constance poring over a road map.
    “What’s up?” he asked. He had mowed the lawn and carried the fragrance of newly cut grass with him into the house, which already was perfumed with roses in just about every room. Mowing his own lawn always made him feel virtuous; shoveling snow did also, although he complained about both chores.
    “I thought I might drive down,” Constance said. “The flights are awful, with changes at La Guardia or Philadelphia or somewhere. Or else the shuttle and then rent a car. And the train’s even worse. Three hours in Penn Station.”
    “Down where? Are we going on a trip?”
    “I am. Marion’s party. I’ll leave on Thursday, get there that night and start home on Sunday. If I’m too tired, I might stop at a motel Sunday night. Depends on what time I get away.”
    “You’ll drive more than three hundred miles for a party?” He heard the incredulity in his own voice.
    She looked up at him and said yes. Her pale blue eyes were glinty.
    It was that damn Viking blood surfacing, he thought then, a streak of stubbornness, a fierce loyalty that verged on insanity, a perverse determination… . If she thought he would yield just like that, he also thought, she was wrong. Why didn’t she come right out and ask him nicely to drive down with her? Make a little vacation out of the affair.
    It wasn’t that they never did things apart. He did little investigative jobs for Phil Stern’s insurance company from time to time. They both did other investigative jobs now and then that took him to one place, her to another. She had presented a paper at a psychology conference just a few months before and had been gone almost a week. He went fishing now and then, and had done some workshops in the past year on techniques of arson investigations. It wasn’t that they would be separated for a few days, it was the glint in her eyes, the too-cool, too-aloof expression on her face that made this different.
    “Watch out for the husband,” he said coldly.
    “I think I’m a little old for such a warning, but thank you. You needn’t worry, that one’s been gone a long time. Actually, she’s married again, to a millionaire, a fact I’ve mentioned more than once—when it happened, and again this past Christmas, as I recall. I sometimes worry about your memory, or is it that you didn’t want to hear anything about Marion? Anyway, she probably will keep