Whispers at Midnight Read Online Free PDF

that?” Erin looked from one to the other of them with a mystified frown.
    “All she’s wearing are her shoes and a big sun hat,” Matt clarified. Mrs. Hayden was ninety if she was a day, and growing increasingly forgetful. Lately she had tended to forget to put on her clothes. This was the fourth time since the weather had turned nice in March that they’d gotten a call from a scandalized driver reporting that she was strolling naked alongside the road as her equally ancient shih tzu snuffled at grass clumps from the end of a leash.
    “Can’t somebody else deal with it?” Shelby asked with a hint of impatience, tapping her fingers against the cover of the notebook as if that were the most important thing in the world.
    “She likes Matt,” Antonio said, grinning again. Matt was beginning to realize that lately a great many of his deputy’s rare grins were being had at his expense. “If any of the rest of us come near her, she clobbers us with her hat. She lets Matt take her home.”
    Erin chortled. Shelby looked disgusted.
    “See ya,” said Matt, taking full advantage of what he could only regard as a heaven-sent opportunity to escape. He never would have thought it possible, but he found as he retreated in good order to his cruiser that today he was actually grateful for having been personally notified that Mrs. Hayden was having one of her more bizarre senior moments again. He’d rather deal with a naked nonagenarian than a love-thwarted thirty-something any day of the week.
    With Antonio riding shotgun, he lifted a hand in farewell to his sister and his ex-girlfriend, then drove out of the parking lot.
    The question of Marsha Hughes’s whereabouts was temporarily put on the back burner as he sped off to make the county safe from the hazards posed by dotty old ladies.

4

    June 29
    O N THIS RAINY MIDNIGHT , Benton was as steamy as the inside of a hot shower. It was as dark and haunted feeling as a dungeon. It was also, Carly Linton discovered as she paused to catch her breath beside the huge birch that had anchored the front yard for as long as she could remember, not quite as dead asleep as such a small town should have been at so late an hour. One person at least was awake, and she was looking right at him—or, rather, part of him.
    Nice butt, was her first thought, as, muscular and tight and hugged by a pair of well-worn jeans, the butt in question moved into her line of vision. Not that she was into noticing men’s butts. Not anymore. Since her divorce she’d felt more like kicking them than drooling over them, nice or not. The state of the butt was merely a fleeting observation, made in passing, as the beam of her flashlight locked onto a man on all fours backing out of the crawl space beneath the front porch of her grandmother’s house. Correction, her house now. Her grandmother had been dead for more than three years, and the turreted Victorian mansion, which Carly had inherited, had been empty since Miss Virgie Smith, who’d been renting the place, had moved into an assisted-living home in Atlanta two months before. By all rights it should have been empty still. As in, no one living there, no one home, no one crawling out from beneath the dilapidatedporch. Typical of the way her luck had been running lately that it was not.
    Freezing in her tracks, her flashlight still trained on the baffling butt, Carly considered her options.
    “Christ almighty, is that a burglar?” Sandra whispered, stopping dead beside her. Five foot ten in her bare feet, admitting to 250 pounds (which was sort of like five-foot, two-inch Carly admitting to 100, a nice lie that was quite a few pounds south of the truth), black and proud, Sandra possessed a truly formidable physical presence that should have provided some comfort under the circumstances. Unfortunately, Carly was all too well aware that beneath her employee/business partner/good friend’s intimidating exterior lurked the soul of a Martha Stewart. And not a