Read Online A Romantic Way to Die by Bill Crider - Free Book Online Page A

so are a few hundred more.”
    Rhodes asked why Mildred wasn’t at the conference. She pointed to her foot.
    “If it weren’t for that ankle, I’d be right there. I’d love to meet that Jeanne Arnot. She’s sold more books than anybody in New York.”
    Rhodes said he was sorry about the ankle and about Mildred’s having to miss the conference. Mildred didn’t seem the type to write romance novels, but apparently there wasn’t a type. He should have known that.
     
     
    Rhodes had another stop to make before he went out and visited Billy Quentin’s woods. He wanted to have a look at Henrietta Bayam’s house. She had lived only about six blocks from downtown Clearview, and Rhodes drove through town to get there.
    He noticed that the rubble from some recently-collapsed buildings had been cleared away sometime within the last few days, but the sight of the vacant lot on what had been one of the busiest corners in the town didn’t do much to cheer him up about Clearview’s prospects for the future.
    He turned left at the corner and drove past two more blocks of what had once been called “the business district.” There wasn’t much business being conducted there now. There was still a fairly prosperous bank on one corner, but most of the rest of the buildings in the block were vacant.
    On the other side of the street there was one store, a vacant building, and a parking lot. The building where one of the town’s biggest grocery stores had once been was empty now, the store having moved into larger quarters out on the highway near the Wal-Mart. Rhodes figured that in another year or two there wouldn’t be a business left in the business district, with the possible exception of the bank. He wondered if anyone would come up with a new name for it then.
    Henrietta had lived in an old brick house with a neatly trimmed yard. The house had belonged to her parents, who had died about ten years previously when Henrietta was barely out of high school, her father in a car accident and her mother of cancer. As far as Rhodes knew, she didn’t have any other relatives. She was the last of the Bayams. She’d been married once, just after her graduation from college, but the marriage hadn’t lasted very long. Rhodes didn’t know why. After that, she had moved back to Clearview and started working as a secretary to the town’s only optometrist. She’d been there ever since.
    Rhodes pulled the county car into the driveway and got out. He stood for a minute and looked the place over. There was a walled concrete porch on the front, with short brick pillars on either side of the steps. The windows were all covered with screens painted black, and there was a black screen door in front.
    Rhodes went up on the porch, opened the screen, and tried the front door. It wasn’t locked. Most people in Clearview still trusted their neighbors and didn’t bother to lock either their houses or their cars, though more and more of them were beginning to do so.
    Rhodes went inside. The front room was chilly. It smelled musty and looked like something out of a nineteenth-century novel. There were a couple of old chairs and an overstuffed couch with lace doilies on the arms. To the right was another room that connected to the living room by what Rhodes thought were called French doors for some reason he’d forgotten, if he’d ever known.
    Henrietta had been using the room as an office. Bookshelves overflowed with paperback romance novels, fat ones, thin ones, and medium-sized ones. A computer desk stood against one wall and held a monitor, keyboard, and printer. The computer box was on the floor underneath. It seemed that every house Rhodes looked into in the course of an investigation had a computer these days, convincing proof to Rhodes that the computer revolution had touched everyone in the world.
    Rhodes opened the French doors and went into the room. There was a cardboard box beside the printer, and Rhodes opened it up to have a look.