Death Will Extend Your Vacation Read Online Free

know her full name?”
    “He’s the guy I wrote the check to,” Jimmy said. “Probably the others did too.”
    A few minutes later, the cop came over to us.
    “I just talked to Sergeant Wiznewski at the scene. The body’s been identified. We’re taking the witness back to your house, so you might as well ride along.”
    “I would kill for lunch,” Barbara said, and then clapped her hand to her mouth. “Anyhow, why can’t we take our car?”
    “Part of the scene, miss.”
    “They’ve got our keys, Barb,” Jimmy said.
    “So you drive us back, I mean the officers do, and then what?”
    “The officers will find a place for you to wait.” Officer Mike’s face twitched.
    “You mean in the house?”
    “That’s part of the scene, too, miss. Maybe the deck. Someone will brief you.” He took in Barbara’s dismayed expression and got human again. “I’ll tell the officer driving you to stop at the deli on the way.”

Chapter Four
    “I can’t believe you told them we’re a clean and sober house,” Lewis said. He stabbed his fork into a mound of spaghetti and twirled it. He was such a big guy that he got a lot of torque.
    He scowled at Jimmy as he spoke.
    “Don’t look at him, dude,” I said. “It was me. Rigorous honesty, right? They were gonna find out, anyhow.”
    I helped myself to a freshly made biscuit, dancing my fingers over it till I decided it wasn’t too hot to hold. Sudden death seemed to have made all of us hungry. There’d been a cooking frenzy in the kitchen once the cops had left. And now the whole gang of us sat around the table shoveling in the results.
    The house had an upside-down design. The entrance was on the ground floor with the four bedrooms. Upstairs was a big living room open to the beams of the roof, a loft where three of the women bunked, and the kitchen. We ate in the living room, laid out to catch as much light and air as possible. Right now, twilight deepening outside the windows leached color from the treetops.
    “I can’t believe you told them we’re a group house, Lewis.” Karen picked olives out of her salad, her big-boned frame hunched over the plate as if she were a giant who had trouble perceiving objects on that scale. Or maybe she needed glasses. She and Lewis were married. “We could get thrown out. We could lose our deposit.”
    “Clea’s dead, and you’re worried about our deposit?” Lewis turned brick red.
    “Guys, hey, easy does it.” Jeannette, large and pink like the overblown roses on her muumuu, mopped her damp forehead, plastered with tendrils of dark curly hair, with a napkin as she tried to make peace. “We’re all upset.”
    A second team of detectives had been there all afternoon, taking depositions and searching not just Clea’s room, but everyone’s. Waiting out on the deck until they said we could go in had gotten very, very boring. It had been hardest on Jimmy, because he’d left his laptop in the house. Jimmy unplugged is a shadow of himself.
    In a different kind of group, it would have seemed callous how, right after that, we calmly sat down to a good dinner. But for alcoholics, booze is the hard shell that armors that vulnerable inner child we’re supposed to have. We don’t know how to deal with feelings, and we’re good at finding ways to avoid them. Me, I get flippant. I’m working on it. Clea’s staring face and sprawled limbs on the beach hadn’t evoked a single wisecrack.
    “Who wouldn’t be upset with the Gestapo pounding at the door?” Lewis reached out and snagged the last biscuit. “I hadn’t even had a cup of coffee.”
    “Oh, come on, Lewis,” Cindy said. I liked the look of her. Compact, like me, with a forthright way of talking. Her sweatshirt said “Beach Blanket Babe,” but the way she wore it, it was clothing, not a come-on. “They didn’t have their weapons out. They were perfectly courteous. And they didn’t drag anyone away.”
    “They did drag me away,” Lewis said.
    “Only because