The Dead Letter Read Online Free PDF

stillness. No breeze rustled the trees. No bird chirped songs. No squirrel chattered peckishly. It was dawn. It was a colourless and vapid dawn, and on this particular morning dawn had turned cheap and unseemly. Even the air was cloying, and it clung to Anne’s skin like a moist web. She shuddered.
    Ordinarily, Anne’s two-mile jogs through the park would be invigorating experiences, but today’s run left her with an unsettled mind. She was glad when the run ended. All she really wanted now was to step into a shower and wash away that untoward feeling.
    Jacqui was up by the time Anne had towelled off and dressed. They had breakfast together. Anne offered to drive Jacqui to school on her way to the office, but Jacqui had already planned to walk with Rada.
    It took less than five minutes to drive from home to her office in the small downtown core of Charlottetown. The office was in a string of nineteenth-century brick buildings across from the Confederation Centre of the Arts and the provincial legislature. Anne’s office was in a second floor walk-up on Victoria Row, a restored cobblestone street, fitted with period lamp posts and refaced brick fronts to please a trendy crowd visiting the artsy shops, boutiques, and restaurants that had set up on the ground floor there.
    Anne unlocked her office door. The bold black letters that emblazoned the frosted glass panel read Darby Investigations and Security.
    Two rooms made up the business suite of her detective agency. The first contained a receptionist’s desk, an empty magazine rack, several straight chairs, and a wooden cabinet. The inner room was spacious and more comfortable. A large old mahogany desk stood near the windows. A sofa, two comfortable stuffed chairs, and a coffee machine nestled along one wall. The other side of the room held several metal filing cabinets and a bookcase and, next to them, nearer the desk, stood an enormous antique Wells Fargo safe. Bill Darby, Anne’s uncle, had stored his small arsenal of firearms in that safe, along with other useful pieces of equipment, ammunition, sensitive documents, and special files.
    Remembrances of Bill Darby hung along the walls. Among them were a framed commendation for bravery from when he pulled two teens from the Rideau Canal after they had lost control of their car; a picture of him receiving a decoration from the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario for a fire rescue; and a group photo of his police academy graduation class. Anne had packed away a few other treasures, but she couldn’t bring herself to remove any more. After all, it had been his detective agency, his retirement project, and it was his name on the door for ten years before she came down from Ottawa to join him.
    In the five years that followed her move, Anne worked as his receptionist, accountant, researcher, and sometime investigator. Just over a year had passed since a sudden, massive heart attack had killed her uncle. He had willed Anne his small estate. His detective agency was part of that bequest. It was worth nothing on paper but, having no other job prospects, she tried to make it work and, so far, she had been able to make a decent living for herself and her daughter Jacqui.
    Anne pulled back the blinds and looked out over the Confederation Centre of the Arts across the street. The sun was bright now; a warm morning breeze seemed to stir the city below, and the odd feeling she had experienced earlier in the day had faded into a memory.
    Anne returned to her desk and opened a case file that she had left there overnight. Her client was Mary Anne MacAdam. Mary Anne was a friend. She was also owner of The Blue Peter, a restaurant and lounge one door down the block. Mary Anne had noticed a recent drop in profits. She suspected that one of her serving staff was stealing from her, but she wasn’t sure. So she asked Anne to look into it. Anne had just completed her report on that job when she heard the click of the letter