Read Online Cheating at Solitaire by Jane Haddam - Free Book Online Page B

survival, but that was what was wrong. That was what was killing him.
    He had spent every single second of his existence trying to escape from Margaret’s Harbor, and he was absolutely certain that this was his last chance.
    9
    In the middle of it, plowing through drifting snow in her calf-high black suede L.L. Bean snow boots, Annabeth Falmer began to wonder if she’d been out of her mind. It was one thing to have a sense of responsibility, to feel that it w asn’t right to leave somebody to die in the cold when youhad the capacity to see if you could help him. It was another to go blundering around when you had no hope of providing assistance at all. It had been many years since Annabeth had been out in a storm like this. She didn’t like to drive in snow, and wasn’t good at it, so when it got like this at home she always just stayed put with Creamsicle and her tea. She wondered if it was worse here because of the sea. She seemed to remember something about the Gulf Stream, which she was sure didn’t come all the way in to Cape Cod. She wished she’d pulled out a snow hat and made Stewart Gordon put it on his very bald head.
    â€œI can see it,” he shouted back at her.
    He wasn’t really very far away. He always stopped and checked to make sure she was coming on. She sped up a little now, still thinking about the hat.
    â€œThere it is,” he said when she pulled up next to him. “They must have spun out. It’s pointing the wrong way for this side of the road.”
    She followed the line of his outstretched hand and saw it: an enormous pickup truck with oversized wheels, painted a violent and uncompromising purple.
    â€œMy God,” she said. “Has somebody been driving that thing around town? You’d think I’d have noticed it.”
    â€œHe’s been driving it around some, yes,” Stewart Gordon said. “It’s Mark Anderman’s.”
    â€œWho’s Mark Anderman?”
    â€œI told you, up at the house. Arrow’s latest boyfriend. Not the guy she married, and not the one after that, but a new one. Maybe a couple of weeks old. She met him on the set.”
    â€œAnd he’s probably in there.”
    â€œNo way to tell from here. Why don’t you stay up here and let me go down and see?”
    Annabeth Falmer was not a woman most men had found a need to protect, but she recognized the impulse when she saw it. She wondered what he was protecting her from: the climb down, or the fact that this Mark Anderman was very probably lying in the driver’s seat stone-cold dead. Either way, she didn’t want to be protected. When Stewart Gordonstarted down the long bank toward the pickup truck and the beach, she followed him.
    It was a bad climb down. Margaret’s Harbor was not Maui. It was not a gentle place. The slopes that led from the roads to the sea were covered with scattered rocks, and steep. Annabeth kept hitting her ankles against hard things, and sinking her legs far into the snow so that the wet came in over the tops of her boots. The sea would have been beautiful if she hadn’t been so afraid of it. It reminded her of that poem by Matthew Arnold, of the death of religious faith, with the waves crashing against the shore under the great white chalk cliffs of Dover.
    They were almost at the truck. Stewart Gordon had stopped to wait for her. “What were you thinking about? You looked like you were thinking about something.”
    â€œI was thinking about trying to write in my office at home when the boys were small, and it would be so cold I’d try to type with gloves on, and it wouldn’t work,” Annabeth said. “It would go down to three degrees Fahrenheit and nothing I did could make the house warm, and I’d be aware all the time, you know, because heat’s expensive and I’d be running it at full blast, that the bill was going to come in and I wasn’t going to be able to pay