To Helen Back

To Helen Back Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: To Helen Back Read Online Free PDF
Author: Susan McBride
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective, Women Sleuths, cozy
funeral service, being held the following day. Yet every pithy expression that came to mind at times like this, every hopeful and inspiring sentence about the dearly departed as a loving father or doting husband, as a devote churchgoer and town citizen, all rang false. For him to portray Milton Grone in such a way was akin to deceit. And should he utter those flowery phrases tomorrow, every soul in River Bend would know it as well as he.
    So how might he describe the person Milton Grone was in life without speaking ill of the dead?
    Fister sighed loudly and dropped the pen to the stark white page. Scratching his beard, he rose from his chair and padded across the floor to the sole window to grace the study behind the apse. Made of two divided panes of stained glass, the window was the room’s centerpiece. A simple bronze plaque beneath read: DONA TED BY GERALD AND EDA GRONE. Milton’s father and mother, or so he’d been told.
    Earnest unhooked the latch that united the colorful scene of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, and he pushed the window open so the afternoon breeze could stir his thoughts.
    The whir of a lawn mower hummed through the air, and he imagined he could smell the fresh-cut grass. Children’s voices rang out from a nearby playground: happy sounds of laughter, strains of “Ring Around the Rosie,” and the faint squeal of the swings as tiny legs pumped them to and fro.
    A smile tugged at his lips, the childish noises striking a near-forgotten chord somewhere inside him. He remembered when his own daughter Maddy was that young. He’d take her to the park, catch her at the bottom of the slide and swing her around in his arms before her feet touched ground again.
    His mouth tightened suddenly, becoming a thin line that he wore often now.
    Had he done all he could for her? Had he done his best? It had been so difficult being both father and mother to the girl ever since his Margaret had died, when Maddy was barely eleven. He’d wanted to do what was right for her always; perhaps he’d been too strict, and not because of his profession, but because he’d been afraid. He’d had to counsel so many adolescents at his old church in St. Louis, children barely into their teens who were hooked on drugs or drink; girls younger than Madeline who’d found themselves pregnant.
    He’d never wanted those things for Maddy. He’d tried to keep her safe. He’d hoped it would be different for them here in this quiet town of River Bend, set so snugly between the bluffs of the Mississippi. He’d prayed it would bring them closer again somehow. Instead, his being so overprotective had only pushed her away.
    “Please, Maddy, talk to me,” he’d begged her in recent days. “Tell me what you’re thinking . . . what you want from me. Tell me how to make things right?”
    “I’m seventeen, Daddy,” she’d told him, looking a decade past in her tight miniskirt and breast-hugging sweater. The dainty features within the oval face seemed hidden beneath excessive makeup in too-bright hues. She’d given a toss to her shiny dark hair as she finished, “It’s too late for you to start fixing things.”
    Fixing things?
    When, Earnest wondered, had they been broken? And who had done the breaking?
    He pulled the pair of panes closed, latching them tightly together and shutting out the carefree noises of the playground, which had suddenly turned so unfriendly.
    He turned away from the stained glass, his gaze settling on his unwritten eulogy for Milton Grone. He had to come up with something, he knew, but what was there to say? God help him, but he felt no remorse at the man’s death. It was his duty to look for something good—anything—in everyone he met. But after being Milton’s neighbor this past year, he’d come up empty-handed. The truth was that Mr. Grone had not been a kind man, nor had he been generous in any way, though Fister had not given up on him completely, not at first.
    Earnest had tried to encourage him
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