Murder on Old Main Street (Kate Lawrence Mysteries) Read Online Free Page B

happy to sit here in peace for a little while, so you just go scribble your little heart out, Dearie,” I assured her and sank gratefully into a visitor’s chair in the cubicle outside the door, where I was issued a lined pad and pencil of my own.
    Nearly two hours later, our signed statements were secured, and Detective Bernstein delivered us back to the Law Barn, where we sank gratefully into the familiar territory of our work day.
    Compared to the hubbub going on a few blocks away, the Monday morning chaos of the Law Barn was relatively soothing. At least here the activity had to do with the business of living, as opposed to what was taking place in front of Blades. At least the ladies would have no shortage of gossip today, I thought, but I was afraid that Emma and I would feature prominently in the clucking. The thing was, this wasn’t the first time I had discovered a body. Just about a year previously, I had been involved in a murder investigation at the law firm where Margo, Strutter and I worked. At this rate it wouldn’t be long before I became a local pariah like that lady sleuth on Murder, She Wrote . Everywhere she went, murder was sure to follow. I had never been able to understand why anybody invited her anywhere after the first year.
    After answering the inevitable questions from Jenny, who sensibly dealt with the situation by bringing us mugs of generously sugared coffee to make of for our abandoned diner brew, Emma and I separated in the lobby. She climbed the stairs to her nook in the loft, and I climbed the few stairs down to MACK’s quarters at the rear of the first floor. With Jenny screening calls from the merely curious, all was serene for half an hour as I scrambled to attend to my accumulated voice and email messages. I was prioritizing the latter when Margo sailed in from a morning showing, filled with sly glee. Rhett Butler padded beside her.
    “Why, Kate, you little dickens! I know Prudy Crane kept you waitin’ for your coffee a time or two, but murder? Remind me never to get on your list.” She dropped her Gucci briefcase on the coffee table and draped herself elegantly on our small sofa, smoothing a stray blonde lock back into her chignon. It might not have been a trendy hairdo, but it suited Margo perfectly. Rhett sprawled at her feet and gazed at her shapely ankles with doggy adoration. “Tell me everything, Sugar.”
    Between phone calls, both hers and mine, I brought her up to speed on the morning’s events. “Poor little Emma,” was her parting comment as we walked back through the lobby together an hour later, she to another showing and I to the restroom. Rhett had been consigned to his comfortable pen in the back yard, where he could belly down in the grass and keep a watchful eye on the neighborhood cats and squirrels for the remainder of the morning. “This must have been Emma’s first up close and personal experience with a corpse. She okay?”
    “Poor little Emma is just fine,” I said dryly, glancing up the stairs to the loft, from which gales of laughter emanated. “After the initial shock, she reverted to norm, thanks to that nice young officer, Rick Fletcher. He had the good sense not to coddle her, even got her laughing.”
    “Hmmm, Fletcher … Fletcher. I don’t believe I know the name.” As fond as Margo was of attractive men in general, she was even more devoted to men in uniform and was, um, personally acquainted with a number of our local law enforcers.
    “Hands off, Margo. He’s barely my son’s age.”
    “And your point is …?” She grinned lasciviously and swayed out the door, waggling polished fingertips at Millie Haines, who was apparently just arriving for work.
    I hurried into the coatroom that occupied a niche to the right of the big barn door and approached the rear wall. Anyone unfamiliar with the Law Barn would have thought me daft, but we regulars were familiar with this architectural peculiarity. The barn itself had been built in the