A Curious Affair Read Online Free Page B

mineshafts located along what looked like a great cross-country ski trail.
    But would his familiarity get me off the hook for a return trip to Irv’s cabin? No. Neither would my protest that I was cold, tired, scared and in pain. Any lawman would wrestle with my guilty conscience and easily overpower it. I was in for a long, painful night.
    Sheriff Murphy is handsome enough to look at. He’s one of what my mother would have called the Black Irish. Some of my friends have even admitted to crossing the room to get a closer look at him. I stood there in the doorway that night and glared at him with eyes that failed to find anything to admire.
    The sheriff looked up and smiled pleasantly, not put off by my glower.
    “Was that you on the phone earlier, Miss Marsh? I thought maybe it was an obscene phone call. Livened up the still watches of the night.”
    “Not tonight,” I said. My glower deepened, and so did his smile. A hint of a dimple appeared in his left cheek.
    “Damn. Well, let me guess—you’ve seen a UFO, Miss Marsh. That’s what brings you in. Please pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable while I get the particulars.”
    “Miss us ,” I corrected. Actually I said mithuth . My jaw was loosening up in the heat of the station, but it was still far from functional. It’s a tribute to the sheriff’s ear that he could understand me. “And if I say yes and I’ve ridden in one, will you let me go home and sleep it off as soon as I’m done here?”
    “Perhaps.” His gray eyes twinkled—they actually twinkled—and I thought of that G. K. Chesterton poem, “The Ballad of the White Horse”: 
    For the Great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry
And all their songs are sad.
    He finally explained when I said nothing more. “Don’t get cranky. I just want to know if you’ve been seeing any of the strange lights folks have been calling in about this evening. I’m going to have to get onto PG&E and find out what’s up at the station. There’ll be hell to pay if folks lose power again. It’s been out three times this week already, and they seem to think that I am personally responsible for it.”
    In a small town the sheriff was pretty much responsible for everything that couldn’t be handled by the priest, the doctor or the undertaker. I felt a moment of sympathy.
    “Oh. No, I haven’t seen lights or green men or even downed power lines,” I said, less grumpily. “I’ve seen rain and a dead body, though. My friend, Irving Thibodaux, is dead. That’s what brings me in. And if you want a guide up the hill to Irv’s place then we need to go now. The road is mostly mud and getting worse by the minute—and we can’t take the car because the track’s barely graded, let alone graveled.”
    “I see. Well, let me fetch my coat.” He reached forthe sheepskin jacket on the back of his chair. It was a large coat. Tyler Murphy isn’t a small man. “Are you quite certain that Irv is dead? Might he just be…extremely indisposed?”
    He meant dead drunk.
    “No, he’s really, really dead,” I said, echoing Atherton’s reply to me when I had asked the same question.
    The sheriff finally lost his smile. He sighed. “Then we’d best be off at once, while there’s a break in the rain. Tell me, Missus Marsh, does it ever stop raining up here?”
    “I heard tell that it happened one July.”
    Murphy was a gentleman after that, holding open doors and taking my arm when the terrain got rough because I kept slipping in the worsening mud. But though he was polite, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he somehow didn’t believe me about Irv. Maybe it was the cloud of alcohol that clung to me in spite of the antacids I’d been sucking to calm my stomach. Or perhaps it was that I sounded like a ridiculous cross between Daffy Duck and Yosemite Sam. Maybe it was that I had called myself Irv’s friend—which I wasn’t. Not exactly. But I didn’t want Murphy thinking I