Murder Sees the Light Read Online Free

have ghosted the book in 1975 from six hours of tape Patten had dropped off in a Georgetown apartment. Nevertheless, the book remained on The New York Times best-seller list for twenty-two weeks. And even in Grantham I found a copy nestling on a shelf next to Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. The bookseller told me it had been translated into seventeen languages and was on sale wherever books of any kind are known. He said it in a funeral director’s voice. I couldn’t figure out whether he was a consumer of Patten’s doctrine or simply impressed by the book’s sales.
    Well, Patten was a long way from Time magazine this afternoon. The rain was falling on the just and the unjust alike. I wondered how the park looked to him after Newsweek and CBS. What was it like to come home again when you couldn’t whisper who you are. No drums and no trumpets for the local hero, not even in the Huntsville Weekly Register.
    I heard the bang on the screen door and guessed Joan was coming across the duckboards between our cabins. She came in, bringing the rain and a scent of freshness and earth with her. Her glasses were steamed up, and she took them off along with her big soaking straw hat.
    â€œGawd, what a downpour! This is what the weatherman called intermittent showers.” Thunder shook the roof; a reminder not to take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. “I brought your milk.”
    â€œYou didn’t have to bring at over at the height of the storm. That’s above and beyond the call of duty. I’ve got the kettle on. Tea?”
    â€œFine. Only, let’s get some light on the subject.” She took the lantern from the table where I’d left it and primed it and pumped it until it hissed. She added a match and a high intense light brought colour back into the cabin and sent long shadows from the ketchup bottle and the salt and pepper shakers radiating along the caramel-coloured table top.
    â€œThat’s better,” she said, climbing out of her black raincoat and setting it on the horsehair sofa. “The Goddamned beavers have blocked the culvert again. I knew those bedsprings wouldn’t keep them out of there. There’s a lake across the road a foot deep. And after this rain … Oh damn, I don’t want to think about it.” I made the tea and kept my mouth shut. In my line, that’s the way to find things out. When it happens. A set of ironstone mugs for the tea were finally located on the shelf above the sink. I bashed the teabags to cut down on the waiting time and got out the open can of evaporated milk.
    â€œBut I just brought you fresh,” she said. She had cleaned her glasses on a piece of pink Kleenex and put them on again.
    â€œNew habits die hard. Take it easy. I’m just learning the ropes around here. First you show me how to do everything, then you come over to see that I do it your way. There’s more than one way to trim a wick.” She smiled and I poured her a cup. I took out the fresh milk and punctured the plastic bag. Joan, the diplomat, took a drop of both, then showed how a real frontiersman stows the plastic milk in a plastic pitcher.
    â€œAre all my chickens safe?” she asked.
    â€œI guess I haven’t taken a proper count, but I haven’t seen anything unusual. Your coming in with the groceries was the big event of the afternoon.” I lit a cigarette and put the wooden match in an ashtray with the name of a defunct brewery on it.
    Joan Harbison had a good ordinary face with blue eyes that didn’t grab you all at once. It took three days. Under light eyebrows, their effects were subtle, like the way the dimple on her right cheek played tag with a little brown mole. Her hair, when it wasn’t soaking wet, was kept in a light and airy brown tangle. Now it hung in dark fangs stuck to her forehead. She didn’t use makeup and she didn’t have to. On the day I arrived she was changing the air filter in