All Fall Down Read Online Free Page A

only known about it a couple of hours. Her aunt said she was supposed to be in Charleston for the weekend visiting a cousin. When she didn’t return by midafternoon, Miss Peyton got worried and called the cousin. Rosalind hadn’t been there at all. That’s when she called me, and Clarke and I have been trying to contact Rosalind’s friends to see what they can tell us, although we haven’t had much luck. None of them seem to be home.”
    “Sunday matinee,” Abel said. “My girl, Arletta, goes every week. Most of the kids do. Not much else for them to do around here on a long Sunday afternoon.”
    “I guess not. In my day we went to the Dairy Queen.”
    “That’s the difference between your day and mine. We worked on Sunday afternoons. Always somethin’ to do on a farm.”
    Logan groaned inwardly. He’d heard about Abel’s childhood on the farm until he could hardly keep from thrashing the man every time he launched into another interminable story of hardship and responsibility. If Abel were to be believed, by the time he was ten years old he’d been running a twenty-acre dairy farm single-handedly.
    “Sure is a coincidence, though,” Abel went on, luckily too diverted by the present drama to dwell on his youth. “Of course, if it turns out the Van Zandt girl was murdered, too, Blaine Avery’s gonna be in one hell of a fix.”
    She certainly would be, Logan thought. Just six months ago she’d called him in hysterics to report that her husband had killed himself. And that’s exactly what it looked like at first. Logan had found Martin Avery slumped in his wheelchair on the terrace. A small, slightly stellate hole appeared in his right temple, indicating a contact wound. Later, the M.E. reported traces of gunpowder on Avery’s right hand.
    But Logan was bothered by the fact that Avery’s Smith & Wesson Combat Masterpiece had been lying near him, not clutched in his hand, as was the case in most suicides by gunshot. Then the next day he’d discovered a slug from the Smith & Wesson lodged in a young maple tree about thirty feet away from the terrace. The slug had not been there long, which the condition of the wood surrounding it indicated, yet Blaine and Robin both claimed they’d never fired the gun and that when Avery had slipped into depression after being paralyzed from the waist down when his Ferrari was crushed by a hit-and-run driver, the weapon had been kept in a locked gun cabinet whose key Blaine had hidden in the lining of her jewelry box. The key, however, was found in Avery’s desk drawer. Although it was possible Avery had found the key earlier, the only time he had been left alone was the Saturday afternoon of his death. Therefore, he would have had no earlier opportunity to fire the gun without the shot being heard by someone else in the house, leading Logan to conclude that the gun had probably been fired twice on Saturday. Perhaps Avery had taken a wild shot before he put the gun to his temple, Logan thought. The only problem was that five unspent cartridges remained in the gun’s six-cartridge cylinder, and it was unlikely that the man would have replaced the missing cartridge before killing himself.
    The prosecuting attorney was certain Avery had been shot, the gun placed in his hand and fired to leave gunpowder residue, then another cartridge inserted in the cylinder to make it appear the gun had been fired only once. Unfortunately, Avery’s beautiful wife—eighteen years his junior, rumored to be involved with Avery’s good-looking young doctor, Richard Bennett, and slated to inherit half of Avery’s ten-million-dollar estate, including his controlling shares in Avery Manufacturing, one of the biggest boatbuilding companies in the eastern United States—had no alibi. She claimed she had left home around twelve-thirty for a shopping trip to a nearby mall. Since Avery’s private-duty nurse, Bernice Litchfield, was to arrive at one o’clock, Blaine said she had not worried about