Read Online A Deadly Cliche by Ellery Adams - Free Book Online

HAS BEEN WITH US FOR THIRTY YEARS, BUT NOW HES REAL SICK. IF YOU WANT TO SEE HIM WHILE HES STILL BREETHING, SEND $1000 CASH TO THIS ADRESS. IF YOU TELL ANYONE THE DEALS OFF.
    Following these astonishing lines was a street address in Wilmington. Apparently, the cash was to be sent in care of a man named RB.
    Olivia hurled the paper onto her desk and shoved her wheeled chair backward so violently that she nearly tipped over. Haviland, jolted out of his full-belly slumber, jumped onto his feet with an alarmed snarl, his brown eyes darting about the room, searching for the source of danger. Anxiously, he sniffed Olivia’s hands, but she made no move to comfort him. Her eyes burned as they stared fixedly at the paper on her desk.
    “It cannot be true,” she whispered. Haviland grew more and more disconcerted by her immobility. He sniffed her again and placed his left front paw on her lap. Absently, she touched the fur on his neck, but her gaze remained on the letter. “It isn’t possible.”
    Olivia never drank alcohol until five thirty in the afternoon, but today she didn’t think twice about breaking this custom. She marched out of her office and straight to the bar. Taking down a clean tumbler from Gabe the bartender’s neat row of polished glasses, she poured out two fingers of Chivas Regal, drank it in a single gulp, and refilled. This time, she added a splash of water and carried the tumbler back to her office.
    Keeping her distance from the letter, she rummaged in a desk drawer until she found a magnifying glass. She then examined every inch of the notebook paper and the envelope from which it came, but found nothing of significance. Next, she turned to the Internet, calling up a map of the North Carolina coast.
    Her father had disappeared on his boat after leaving the mouth of Oyster Bay Harbor and entering Pamlico Sound. He could certainly have motored close enough to Wrightsville Beach or the port area of Wilmington, abandoned the boat, and swum ashore. He could have also hopped aboard another fishing vessel and headed out for a long journey in deep waters, but Olivia had always dismissed that theory because it meant that he didn’t want to be found, that he deliberately let his daughter believe that it was the fog and the whiskey and the angry seas that had claimed his life.
    She traced the bumpy coastline on the computer screen. Was it possible? Could her father be alive? Could he be as close as Wilmington?
    “How do you know who I am?” she asked the anonymous writer angrily, jabbing at the paper with her letter opener. The blade landed near one of the holes, slicing it neatly all the way to the edge. It was satisfying, and for a moment, Olivia was tempted to cut the entire letter to shreds, to stab and slice it until she could convince herself that it had never existed.
    “But it does exist and I need to decide what to do about it.” She put the opener away in the drawer and held the letter under the light. “No Harvard graduate here. Either that, or this writer doesn’t proofread.” Missing apostrophes, spelling errors, and the use of capital letters throughout seemed to emphasize her initial reaction about the author; that he or she didn’t put pen to paper very often.
    “ ‘He’s been with us for thirty years,’ ” she repeated the line aloud. “Who is ‘us’?” She took a drink. “Who the hell is ‘ us ’!”
    Anger swelled inside her, but she held it in check. She needed to think straight. Why would this person approach her after all this time? Either the letter writer needed money or her father did. When Olivia’s grandmother died, leaving the Limoges oak-barrel fortune to her only relative, Olivia, news of the young woman’s incredible wealth had been in all the papers.
    For years, paparazzi kept tabs on her every move, but she had eventually escaped to the one place they wouldn’t bother to track her. She returned home and became a businesswoman, homeowner, and solid member of