On the Rocks: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery Read Online Free

Seven Days Work. From what Miss Lewis told him, someone in a red shirt might still be running toward The Whistle for help or lying there hurt.
    Miss Lewis, Miss Cather, Cobus, and Felix went along to help him locate the spot where the man had gone off the cliff. They saw no sign of a red shirt anywhere. In fact, they saw no signs of anything on the trail. Nothing let them know the exact place of the man’s fall. A few scuff marks here and there on the hard-packed earth and small patches of scattered stones in the open areas among the trees, but nothing unusual. They went as far as the place where the brook from Rocky Corner turned into a waterfall, then Cobus and Felix volunteered to cover the rest of the distance to The Whistle while Daggett and the others headed back to Whale Cove. There was just enough time before the sun went down for Eric Dawson to row him to the beach below.
    With the tide running out, Eric was uncertain about exactly which boulder caught the man’s fall, and they found nothing further to guide them. They reached the dock at Whale Cove just as Cobus and Felix returned to report that they had been alone on the trail, and no one at The Whistle remembered seeing anyone or hearing anything unusual that whole afternoon.
    By the time Daggett reached North Head, every villager readily directed his attention to The Swallowtail Inn. The stories about the dead stranger were already beginning to build. He had arrived only that morning on the S. S. Grand Manan. He came by himself and asked directions to The Swallowtail Inn. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, he had never before been on Grand Manan. He had eaten lunch at Rose Cottage and purchased three biscuits at the bakery. He had not yet fully unpacked his luggage. He had been seen on the docks and strolling through the village. Every person in North Head claimed to have exchanged words with him but no one remembered hearing his name. He had expressed interest in the island’s numerous trails.
    Were it not for Miss Lewis, Daggett would at that point have gone home for the evening satisfied that this unknown off-islander was unnecessarily hasty about hiking and had taken an incautious step in his wing-tipped shoes. But the red shirt had somehow to be explained. When it was, maybe then Daggett would understand how a man in a pin-striped suit could wind up on the rocks below Seven Days Work.
    D ESPITE all the hard work Sabra Jane and Willa and Edith had put in on the wall, tea that afternoon had been intended more as an opportunity for conversation than a revival for tired bodies, though Edith had hoped it would serve both purposes. Now, her body thoroughly exhausted with the day’s events, Edith settled deeper into the mattress and chose to rest her mind in the pleasantness of that earlier conversation, hoping sleep would soon follow.
    Sabra Jane had been coming to Grand Manan for at least as long as they had, but she was still relatively unfamiliar to them. They always said hello when they saw each other in North Head, the main village on Grand Manan, within easy walking distance of Whale Cove, but Sabra Jane was not part of their Whale Cove enclave and so they had little occasion to get to know each other.
    “I grew up on Twenty-Seventh Street,” Edith found herself responding to Sabra Jane’s puzzled eyes during their conversation over tea. “In Lincoln, Nebraska, not New York.”
    “Of course, I should have realized. Twenty-Seventh Street just didn’t make sense with everything else you’ve said about living in New York,” Sabra Jane’s eyes, brown-flecked with gold, crinkled with her smile. She seemed unconcerned about crow’s feet and made no attempt to cover her freckles with powder or her head with a hat. Edith liked that about her. She was quite certain Willa did too.
    “Willa did not enjoy Twenty-Seventh Street or Lincoln as much as she might have,” Edith arched her right eyebrow, the only one that would arch. “I believe she felt