Winter at the Door Read Online Free

full of celery seed so delicious she was tempted to sip the remaining puddles with a spoon. “You could put it that way.”
    Coming into the restaurant, he’d been greeted by everyone they passed, and when he stopped at booths and tables to chat, he knew their names and their kids’ and grandkids’ names. In Maine, she recalled, county sheriffs were elected officials.
    “The thing is,” he went on, washing the last bit of roll down with a sip of coffee. “The thing is, I’ve got ex-cops dying on me. When they shouldn’t be. And I’ve got questions about it.”
    He’d chosen a booth farthest from the rest of the room, a noisy spot near the cash register. She stopped chewing.
    “Really.” In her experience, when somebody started talking like this, you just tried not to get in the way.
    You just let them know you were listening. Chevrier took a slow, casual look around the room to make sure no one else was, then went on.
    “Yeah. Last year or so, four of ’em. All on the up-and-up, says the medical examiner.”
    “But you don’t think so.” Obviously, or he wouldn’t be talking to her about it. “So they were all unwitnessed deaths?”
    Because otherwise the medical examiner probably wouldn’t have been called at all. Chevrier nodded, speared half a hard-boiled egg, and ate it.
    “First one, Dillard Sprague, last December,” he recited. “He was a boozer, lost his job with the Buckthorn PD over it a few months before.”
    He washed the egg down with some coffee. “Supposedly he slipped on an icy step coming out of his back door, late. Got knocked out, lay there, and froze to death. His wife, Althea, found him when she got home the next morning from her night shift at the hospital.”
    Lizzie winced. “Not a fun discovery, huh? But if that’s all there was, couldn’t it have been accidental, just the way it seemed?”
    Chevrier looked sour. “Right. Could’ve. If he was the only one. Next guy, Cliff Arbogast, a few months later. He lives right up next to the Canadian border, got let go off the Caribou force when it turned out he’d been running the family car with his department gas card.”
    He ate more salad. “Which,” he went on around it, “wouldn’t have been so bad, but his wife was an Avon lady, drove all over taking orders and making deliveries.”
    Lizzie loaded mashed potatoes and gravy onto her fork. From outside, Grammy’s Restaurant had looked like any other roadside joint: red and white sign, aluminum siding, twenty feet of gravel parking lot separating it from the highway it sat beside.
    Inside, though, it was clean as a whistle and smelled like a place where somebody really knew how to cook.
    Which somebody did. She ate some more meatloaf. Then: “What happened?” she asked. “To the Avon lady’s ex-cop husband?”
    Chevrier dragged a chunk of iceberg lettuce through a dollop of Russian dressing and chomped it. “Electrocuted.”
    “Excuse me?” She’d heard him, all right. But modern building codes and wiring regulations made such accidents rare. The only fatal power mishap she’d ever seen, in fact, wasn’t a household event at all.
    It was after a big storm, back when she was a rookie patrol cop on the Boston PD: downed trees, live wires, standing water. Add a bunch of pain-in-the-butt looky-loos out gawking at the damage and, presto, one dead civilian.
    But cops knew better. Some she’d worked with wouldn’t go near a live-wire situation until the power company was on scene.
    Chevrier seemed skeptical, too. “Yeah. Spring evening, Cliff’s taking a bath, listening to the Red Sox on the radio,” he said.
    “Radio’s on the sink, it’s plugged into the outlet by the mirror, you know? So he reached for his razor and shaving cream and somehow he knocked the radio into the tub with him.”
    He grimaced. “Or that’s how the story goes, anyway.”
    “Huh.” She ate the last bite of her mashed potatoes, drank some Coke, meanwhile trying to picture all this.