Cancelled by Murder Read Online Free Page A

even a storm could stop the tide of sports information. Impatient for more local details, I called Ben.
    â€œWouldn’t your friend know who was killed?” he asked. “Isn’t she the chief of police?” Ben wisecracked.
    â€œI thought she might be a little busy right now,” I said.
    â€œAnd I’m not?”
    â€œNo, you’re not.”
    â€œDang right,” he said, chuckling. “I heard it was branches.”
    â€œExcuse me?”
    â€œBranches of a big old maple got lopped off by the wind and hit someone. Don’t know who.”
    From my television, which had finally caught up, I heard similar words. Branches. A tree in the backyard. A visual showed the flashing lights of the ambulance, fire truck, and patrol cars on Main Street from a couple of hours ago. It was impossible to tell exactly which address was the scene of the accident, but it was surely on the route I’d driven only an hour ago, between the post office and my home. The police department building was in that same stretch of properties. How sad that someone had died within the shadow of those who might have been able to protect him. But as old Harvey’s daddy had said, one way or another, the storm was going to win.
    I called a few people and left messages or not, deciding on the spot. I’d run out of options for getting information onwho the storm victim was and thought I should do something productive. I wasn’t usually home in the daytime, and though I’d often claimed the opposite, I had no intention of giving my house a thorough cleaning, sorting through old photos, or organizing my files. Maybe in retirement.
    I tried Quinn to see if a Skype session was possible but then remembered today was a big travel day for him, up to Bangor, Maine. I knew the storm was still rattling around the East Coast in various stages of severity, and hoped he was not in its path.
    I’d finished my office work, gone through all my magazines, worked on my quilt until the point where I needed Daisy’s advice on color matching, and almost given in to a vacuuming session when my doorbell rang. Though the wind had died down significantly, the rain was still pretty heavy and I suspected some of our streets were flooded. Who could be ignoring the warnings to stay off the roads? Whoever it was rang again, more insistent.
    I peeked through the blinds in the living room, then opened the door to the chief of police. She brushed by me carrying a large covered plastic container. “Chicken soup. I knew you wouldn’t have anything good.”
    Sunni was the quintessential small-town woman. She did it all—cooked (not just your everyday chicken soup), quilted, baked from scratch, and held down one of the most responsible jobs in the county. Maybe that was why I’d left town after high school. I knew I couldn’t measure up to images like hers. Living in the Fenway District of Boston, where all supplies and services and all the major food groups were a phone call away, had made me even more lazy.
    A typical conversation between Linda and me would bear that out.
    Scene: a living room, hers or mine, on a weekday evening after work.
    â€œI wish I had something good to go with coffee.” (Her or me.)
    â€œWe could whip up a coffee cake. They’re not hard to make.” (Me or her.)
    â€œDo you have any flour?”
    â€œI’m not sure.”
    â€œOr we could go to Dunkin’ Donuts and have one of their banana chocolate chip muffins.”
    â€œAnd take back a few extra for the rest of the week.”
    In the next scene, we’d be at the nearest coffee shop, having called a couple of buddies to join us.
    â€œNext time, we should bake ourselves,” one of us would say, pulling a muffin apart. “How hard can it be?” And the others would laugh.
    Now I watched the slight-framed Sunni, her auburn hair dripping from the rain, standing over my stove. I loved that she knew