Don't Dare a Dame Read Online Free

wish,” said Isobel.
     
        I thought for a minute. About the dog, for one thing. Like Boike, I saw something significant in the violence with which the animal had been killed. A quick, shallow slash of the knife would have silenced it just as thoroughly. For that matter, how would a stranger know there was a dog to be silenced until it started to bark an alarm?
     
        The direction those thoughts led disturbed me. I couldn’t begin to guess what was going on, but I had no doubts that right now these two somewhat sheltered women needed someone looking out for them.
     

    
     
        
     
        
     
        
     
    Four
     
        
     
        The business with the Vanhorn sisters got to me. It wasn’t just the savagery of the attack on the dog. It was also the idea someone would deprive a blind woman of an animal so crucial to her functioning.
     
        That morning I’d dropped off a bundle of clothes at Spotts’ Laundry, as I did every Thursday. On the way back to my office, I stopped to retrieve it, hoping the familiar routine and yakking with the counter girl would lift my spirits. It didn’t. Since Finn’s was a good place to brood, and to find the man who could maybe fill me in on a thing or two about the flood that had become a cornerstone of the city’s history, I headed there.
     
        I’d been eighteen when my dad died. Two days later, bawling so I couldn’t see, I’d said good-by to the house where I’d grown up. Unknown to him, I’d had to sell it to cover the bills from his long illness. I’d walked to Finn’s where an old school chum who knew the score had given me an awkward hug. Finn, the owner, had drawn me a half pint of Guinness from a barrel marked Root Beer, repeal of Prohibition still being one year away. The pub had been the nearest thing I had to a home ever since.
     
        “Hey, Maggie,” called a man at the bar that ran along the right wall as you came through the door. He drained the last of his stout. “Wee Willie here’s claiming he kissed you out on the playground when you two was in the fifth grade.”
     
        “The only one likely to kiss Wee Willie in fifth grade was one of the nuns. He was their little darling.”
     
        Hoots erupted. The man with the empty glass gave Wee Willie a thump on the back that almost knocked him from his stool. Willie Ryan, who’d gotten his nickname because of his tiny stature, waggled a finger at me. We’d been slagging each other since we were old enough to tie our shoes. We’d still be doing it until one of us died. Maybe longer.
     
        After I’d yakked with Finn and he’d pulled me a pint and then let it rest until he could give it a perfect head, I carried it to one of the tables with mismatched chairs that occupied the rest of the place. It was the time of day when regulars drifted in after work, among them numerous cops with collars undone to show they’d come off duty. I’d gone to a Swedish massage place once and come away feeling like I’d been beaten up in an alley. Sitting here while a rhythm as predictable as my own pulse seeped into me and voices I knew engaged in arguments I’d heard a thousand times relaxed me a lot better.
     
        Maybe I didn’t want to brood as much as I wanted to think. Somebody had it in for the Vanhorn sisters. Somebody well enough known to them that their dog hadn’t sounded an immediate alarm. Their brother Neal would be my pick. He didn’t appear to care what happened to anyone else, just what suited him.
     
        Then again, couldn’t the same be said of my own brother?
     
        I’d been ten and he was four years older when he took off. He’d known it would leave me to bear the brunt of our mother’s scalding resentment. Not that she didn’t lash Ger with the same criticism she poured on me. Occasionally, though, she’d managed a word of approval for Ger.
     
        Maybe it was the shattered crockery in the Vanhorn kitchen