Murder on the Cliff Read Online Free

his charge card again. Chanel—how boring. I would have expected the mistress of a rich man to have more imagination, wouldn’t you, Mother? A jacket with four pockets, a straight skirt, and a bunch of pearls. She might as well be wearing a uniform.”
    Charlotte thought Nadine looked terrific.
    The rivalry between Marianne and Paul’s mistress was of long standing. They hated one another, and for good reason: each was what the other was not but wanted to be. Marianne had sometimes been called the ugly daughter of a beautiful mother. She had oodles of style, but at the price of hours of slavish attention to her appearance. Nadine came effortlessly by the glamor that Marianne labored so hard to achieve, but she had no worldly status. She was the widow of a wealthy man from a prominent family who had given most of his fortune away to noble causes and then died suddenly, leaving her with two little boys, a sprawling old Victorian cottage on Bellevue Avenue, and no money to speak of.
    “You should be nice to her, dear,” said Connie with a mischievous little smile. “Maybe she’ll give you a good write-up in the Newport Daily News .”
    Marianne snorted in contempt. Her face had a hint of innocent malice about it that Charlotte found intriguing. Her eyes were a little too close together, the corners of her mouth given to devilish little quivers.
    Nadine made a living of sorts as the society reporter for the local paper, which allowed her to attend the right parties and mingle with the social set, but it was sorry compensation for someone whose aspiration was to marry Paul Harris and become the doyenne of Newport society. As Connie put it: “First she had the name and no money; now she has the money [Paul’s] and no name. She wants the name and the money.” But Paul wasn’t cooperating. After five years, he’d still made no move toward marriage. To the contrary, he seemed to delight in his role as wealthy bachelor. Having a beautiful French mistress enhanced his man-about-town image; having her as a wife would only detract from it. It was getting to be a desperate situation for Nadine, who was faced with the choice of sticking with Paul in hopes that he would eventually marry her, or seeking her fortune elsewhere before time took too great a toll on her looks. A man who wanted a woman as an ornament generally wanted a bright and shiny one.
    Marianne was surveying the gathering again. This time, her sharp brown eyes alighted on a tall, muscular, and very handsome man in a navy blue kimono, on the other side of the porch. His dark brown hair was slicked back and fastened in a topknot, the traditional hair style of the sumo wrestler.
    Connie followed her daughter’s gaze and then looked over at Charlotte with dismay. They had both seen that look before. It was not unlike that of a bird dog in pursuit. Marianne’s jaw stuck out, her nose pointed at her quarry, and her nostrils quivered with anticipation. Had she possessed a tail, it would have stuck straight out in excited agitation. It was a look that was reserved for something that she had to possess, usually a man. The last time Charlotte had seen it was when Marianne had spotted the handsome young Italian prince at a party at her stepfather’s palazzo in Venice.
    “Following in Mother’s footsteps,” Marianne had said of the Italian prince. But there was a difference. When Connie had married Cornelio, a. k. a. Count Brandolini, she had been forty-five, the count fifty-one. When Marianne had married her Italian prince, she had been forty-five, the prince twenty. It had provoked quite a scandal. Though she denied it had been a motive, the marriage had also been good publicity for her “Palazzo” collection. She had no regrets, Marianne had told the gossip columnists when she split up with her young prince six months later. She claimed to have been in love with all the men she had relations with. Each of the men in her life was a point of light on her path to