The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF Page A

woman? Whether I’ve been driven to write poetry or make promises of a lifetime commitment that no man on earth has ever kept?”
    “No,” said Arny. “Not the actions. Just the feeling. Have you ever had your insides melt by being near someone?”
    I thought I noticed a brief hesitation before Grandad spouted, “Don’t be ridiculous.”
    “Then you wouldn’t know,” said Arny. “It’s attraction. It’s like being a magnet that’s found a refrigerator it wants to spend the rest of its life stuck to.”
    Arny had inherited my mother’s gift for horrible metaphors. But this was a rare moment of family bonhomie. Mair, whom I’d sent off in search of the men, had presumably forgotten why. She hadn’t come back. So it was a good chance to ask Grandad an uncomfortable question.
    “Grandad, why do you hate our father?”
    The fork he’d been juggling flew over his shoulder and missed Gogo by a whisker. She screamed.
    “That isn’t an appropriate topic over a meal,” he said.
    “I haven’t served up yet,” I reminded him.
    He looked first at the door, then the window, as if sizing up an escape route.
    “Ask him ,” he said.
    “We would,” said Arny. “But he’s vanished again.”
    “That’d be right.” Grandad nodded. “He’s good at that.”
    “Did you know before?” I asked.
    “Know what before what?”
    “You know what I’m talking about. Did you know our father was here? That it was the reason Mair brought us down?”
    “No. I did not,” he snapped.
    “But you recognized him when we arrived?” said Arny.
    “That very first day,” he said. “I was almost on the first bus back to Chiang Mai.”
    “So why didn’t you tell us?” my brother asked.
    Grandad was squirming. He didn’t like being cornered like this.
    “I was hoping that mother of yours would come to her senses,” he said. “Realize what he was and leave this forsaken wilderness. But instead she ends up … fornicating with him. It’s disgusting.”
    “They’re still legally married,” I told him.
    “Irrelevant,” he said. “People over forty should know better. All that physical nonsense should be out of the system long before then.”
    “She’s obviously forgiven him for whatever it is he did,” I said.
    “If you can forgive someone for being worthless.”
    We found Mair painting flowerpots. She thought she’d eaten already. We sat around the lunch table with nothing much more to say, but I watched Grandad pick at his kanom jeen and two things occurred to me. One: that he didn’t have any more of an idea than us as to why Captain Kow had deserted us. And two: that he was a sad, grumpy, bitter old man. But it wasn’t him I felt sorry for. It was Granny Noi. I would have headed off to the pyre even sooner if I’d been married to him for fifty years.
    *   *   *
    It was 1:46 when I arrived in front of the big yellow gate in the tall yellow wall that bordered the Coralbank property. It was no wonder I hadn’t noticed it before. It was on a hill that formed the headland at the southern end of our bay. From the road you saw only a dirt track rising between the trees. That road eventually arrived at Kor Kow Temple, but there was a flatter path along the beach that didn’t put a strain on your motorcycle. Nobody took the hill road and that fact made the headland a prime piece of real estate for a writer. The tranquility would only be disturbed by occasional temple fêtes.
    The only thing that concerned me was how his pretty Thai wife might be coping with living above a temple. We have a lot of head and feet politeness issues in Thailand. It doesn’t worry me because I’m culturally ambivalent. And countless condominium owners in Chiang Mai have no qualms about riding their stationary bicycles on the balcony within view of the shiny domed heads at the neighborhood temple. But I know diehards who fear dispatch to one of the Buddhist hells for such sacrilege. What camp was Mrs. Coralbank in? I