The Boric Acid Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

before the first shovel went into the ground.
    MATT HAD PICKED ME UP at Boston’s Logan Airport at three-thirty in the afternoon, East Coast time, and driven me directly to the Galigani residence. I’d been away only ten days, but Rose had planned what was supposed to be a happy reunion.
    “Come straight to our house, Gloria, and we’ll have an early
dinner,” Rose had told me over the phone the night before. “Robert and John will be here, too. Besides, I want to see you and make sure you’re home to stay.”
    Although her voice was full of laughter, Rose had good reason to worry—thirty years earlier, after my fiance died in a car crash, I’d left my oceanside hometown and gone to Berkeley, California, where I stayed until a year ago. At fifty-five I decided to return and find out if I’d missed anything. It turned out, I had.
    My luggage was still in the trunk of Matt’s steel-blue Camry—my clothes stuffed into a duffel bag, unlaundered. I felt like a level four biohazard worker running from one crisis to another. But the circumstance of John’s arrest had sent enough adrenaline through my system to sustain however many more waking hours I needed. Besides, I had three hours on everyone else in town.
    We carried my luggage up the two flights of stairs. Neither of us liked to ride the elevator in the Galigani Mortuary. Spots of blood and other displaced organic material haunted my fantasy of the closed, padded space that Frank and Robert used to transport their clients, as they referred to them.
    When Matt’s beeper went off, I knew a long kiss was all I could hope for before Matt would leave.
    “Don’t make any plans for tomorrow,” he said.
    “Day or night?”
    “Both,” he said, and we kissed again.
    IT TOOK LESS THAN an hour to reconnect with my life. My E-mail and phone messages were light since I’d accessed them from Elaine’s house in Berkeley. One phone message had come in during the morning from Peter Mastrone, an old friend who expected more than renewed friendship from me. I deleted it, with a resolution to be clearer than ever about how I felt, or didn’t feel, about him.
    One quick look at the U.S. mail, a call to Rose, then I’d take a nap. It was only six o’clock California time, but I felt I’d already lived those extra three hours. I sifted through flyers,
magazines, and bills, filtering out the first-class letters. A few letters from former professional colleagues, sure to be part business, part personal. A bright pink envelope from my cousin Mary Ann in Worcester, probably a late-arriving bon voyage card. A thick letter from the youngest Galigani child, Mary Catherine, a chemical engineer living in Houston. I wondered if she’d been told yet about her brother’s arrest.
    The last piece of first-class mail had no return address. A small off-white envelope of good quality, postmarked REVERE. I slit it open and pulled out a plain sheet of matching paper.
    My throat tightened as I scanned the neatly typed lines, then reread every word.
    KEEP OUT OF POLICE WORK. TAKE UP SEWING. END YOUR NEW POLICE CAREER, OR I WILL.
    My fingers gripped the note. I looked around quickly, as if the author might be standing over me with a coat rack, ready to push me out the door and down my own staircase.

FOUR
    IT MEANS NOTHING, I told myself as I chained my door and set the intrusion alarm. I carried the letter, stuffed back into its envelope, to one of my pale blue glide rockers—the only furniture that survived my cross-country move—and put it on my lap. Was I hoping it might have a different message when I pulled it out again?
    I’d looked forward to returning to my neat apartment—simple furnishings, framed prints of San Francisco and the Bay Area. I hoped for a little breeze to carry the smell of salt air to my window onto Tuttle Street and St. Anthony’s Church. A threatening note was not part of my welcome home plan.
    I read the letter again, and annoyance replaced my initial reflexive