Read Online Death is a Bargain (A Kate Kennedy Mystery Book 3) by Noreen Wald - Free Book Online Page B

sighed. “I went home for lunch. Mother had a date with someone, so I drove over to the beach; we live on A1A, you know.” She spoke quickly, as if she had to get her story out, but enunciated like a prep-school student. “I picked up the mail. I’d ordered a book of poetry from Amazon, and I wanted to see if it had arrived, thought I might start it over lunch.”
    Was Olivia going anywhere with this tale? Despite her good diction, she’d started to ramble. Marlene pulled a Kate and just nodded. Even the opinionated Linda, who shot a puzzled look at Marlene, was listening for once.
    “And there in the mail was a note from Freddie.” The young woman sounded sick. “A very cruel note.”
    Ballou began to bark. Sharp, repetitive barks, demanding Marlene’s attention.
    He darted over to the circus entrance, getting more and more excited. His sharp barks took on a staccato beat, bordering on hysteria.
    “It, it…I think Freddie is trying to blackmail us.” The girl shuddered. “Blackmail me.”
    “Shut up, Olivia.” Suzanna strode across the corridor, just as Marlene smelled smoke.
    Ballou ran back to Marlene, urgency in every movement. He kept up his cadence of barking.
    “Smoke!” Linda screamed, pointing to the circus door. “There’s a fire in the Big Top!”
    Marlene watched as smoke seeped in. It smelled like logs in a damp chimney.
    Ballou kept barking out his high-pitched alarm. Marlene shouted, “Good dog!” She grabbed the cash box and the Miriam Haskell display case and followed him toward the tent’s exit yelling, “Everyone, get out now!”

Fourteen

      
    “Come on, Billy, Marlene must be having a fit.” Kate toyed with the idea of calling her sister-in-law, but then she’d have to listen to two lectures: one now, and one when she arrived in the corridor.
    They’d settled on a fire truck, complete with all the bells and whistles, including a hook and ladder. Billy’s eyes had lit up like a Christmas tree when its siren had gone off. The cowboy on horseback was tossed back onto the toy vendor’s table, and Billy couldn’t stop talking about his new “fruck.” Kate’s older son had had the same problem, pronouncing “truck” as “fruck,” leading to a very embarrassed Charlie who’d walked his son past a firehouse, only to have Kevin shout, “Look at the fruck in garage.”
    Strolling in the sunshine, holding Billy’s hand, Kate felt happier at this moment than any time since Charlie’s death.
    If not perfect, her marriage had been damn good. Kate would have given it an A most days and an A-plus on weekends.
    She and Charlie had married before she could vote. They’d celebrated her twenty-first birthday at Tavern on the Green, followed by a hansom cab ride around Central Park. Charlie, on a patrolman’s salary, had scrimped for months, eating tuna sandwiches for lunch and resoling his old shoes.
    Though Kate had been a stewardess before her wedding, she’d quit her job because even single women who flew from city to city, offering “coffee, tea, or cocktails” to male passengers, were suspect. A bestselling book spoofing stewardesses, Coffee, Tea, or Me , had been taken literally by many men back in those dark ages of crinolines and corsets.
    Most married women cleaned, cooked, and ironed, and the only men they served were their husbands.
    Kate loved Charlie and, to her surprise, loved being what the Ladies Home Journal called a “homemaker.”
    She got pregnant on her honeymoon and produced Irish twins, Kevin and Peter, eleven months apart. The boys and Charlie delighted her. And that delight proved reciprocal, even contagious. Her beloved brick Tudor in Rockville Centre housed four very happy people. If outsiders saw her as only a wife and mother, she considered it high praise. The tough homicide detective had treated her like a partner, and he’d turned out to be a great dad and an even greater husband.
    “Oh, Charlie, I miss you.”
    “Who are you talking to, Mrs.