TheCart Before the Corpse Read Online Free Page A

Hiram’s part of the country or at the high levels at which he competed. Even on the few occasions I did, I generally managed to avoid coming face-to-face with him.
    Maybe he thought he deserved the cold shoulder I gave him. Judging from his emails, after he retired and had time to look back, he finally began to get how badly he’d hurt Mother and me. And I had grown up enough to cut him some slack. He had never planned to hurt us, after all.
    He always considered us a parallel universe. What he did in his professional and personal life away from us shouldn’t affect us. When he told my mother, “Honey, none of those women has anything to do with you and Merry,” he believed himself. When he didn’t come home on my birthday after he’d promised he would, he couldn’t understand why I was upset. After all, he was driving .
    I ran into his current and former mistresses at shows regularly. I was studiously polite, whatever turmoil I felt inside. After all, he was no longer married to my mother, so he wasn’t committing adultery, although in some cases they were. I simply didn’t want to know more about his personal life than I already knew. I think most kids feel that way about their parents. I know Allie feels that way about me. I’d no more discuss a new boyfriend (assuming I had one) with her than I’d fly to the moon. Even at his age Hiram was still a handsome man and a charmer. No doubt he’d charmed his landlady. I sincerely hoped he’d found someone he cared about who cared about him. She had found his body. Where? This apartment? Out at his new farm?
    I don’t know how long I had been sucking back the tears in her driveway when the front door of the house opened and light spilled out.
    “Ms Abbott?” A female voice called. Strong. Not an old lady quaver.
    I took a deep breath and climbed out of the truck. “Ms. Caldwell?” I went to her and offered my hand. “People call me Merry. Big joke.”
    “Why?”
    “I’m not.”
    Her grip was firm. She was slim, nearly as tall as my five-ten and straight as a stick. No sign of a dowager’s hump. “Please come in. If I leave the door open for long the cats get curious and wander outside. If they manage to make the front porch they have hysterics trying to get back in. I’ll take you downstairs to Hiram’s apartment in a little while. I assume you’re hungry. Come in and have a drink and a sandwich. And please call me Peggy.”
    I had the feeling I’d be expected to eat even if I’d stopped at a fast food joint twenty minutes earlier and scarfed up double cheeseburgers, and that she wanted to talk. So did I, but not necessarily tonight. My stomach rumbled. I was hungry. My peanut butter crackers had worn off a while back.
    I followed her into an entrance foyer. Not much furniture, but the Oriental rug on the floor looked like a valuable antique. So did the one that covered the floor of the living room, the one I could glimpse in the dining room, and finally, the one in what I assumed was the library, since every wall held floor-to-ceiling bookcases stuffed with books. Even at a glance I could tell the books weren’t fancy by-the-yard editions, but well-worn paperbacks and hard covers. I could see the brightly colored spines of mysteries and detective stories. One of the larger books read Murderers, Inc.
    “Hope you don’t mind eating in the kitchen,” she said. “I don’t use the dining room except at Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
    I felt something warm around my feet and looked down to see a gigantic tabby cat the color of butter, oozing figure eights around my ankles. When I reached down to scratch his head, he rolled over on his back and offered a rotund belly. As I raised my head, I saw a big gray tabby on top of a leather recliner by the fireplace, while a small black cat crouched on the windowsill and a gray cat sat neatly curled on a cushion on the hearth. They all watched me intently. I wondered how many others were lurking out of