Read Online Larceny and Old Lace by Tamar Myers - Free Book Online

do, and just might stumble across it sometime when I have a week to clean out my purse. At any rate, I had a devil of a time trying to find Aunt Eulonia’s back faucet, much less a clay pot hidden in the weeds.
    â€œCan I help you?” a man asked.
    I jumped at least three feet, which is quite a feat considering the length of my legs. I had once attended a seminar on self-defense for women and had gone away, after a mere two hours, feeling like I could disable Goliath. Now, while I would encourage other women to take similar self-defense courses, I feel that I must warn them about something I didn’t learn in my class. It is possible to get so frightened that you wet your pants.
    â€œI’m sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you,” the man said.
    It took several seconds for my brain to sort through a myriad of quavering stimuli and come to the conclusion that most muggers and rapists are seldom that polite. After a very brief period in which I lay collapsed in a bush (they were not azaleas, but hollies!), and several minutes of the heaviest breathing I had experienced since the advent of Tweetie, I was able to speak.
    â€œWho the hell are you, and what are doing here?”
    â€œFunny, I was about to ask you the same,” he said.
    â€œI may be small, but I’ve been trained in the martial arts,” I puffed. “You want a demonstration?”
    â€œThat would be very interesting,” he said. “I haven’t seena good demonstration of that since I was in the marines.”
    â€œMove over there to the light, buster, where I can see your face.”
    If a bird could bluff to defend her nest, then so could I. Only I didn’t have a nest to defend, and unlike a bird I couldn’t fly away if the bluff failed. What was I doing? I would have been much better staying in the holly bush. Make him at least get his arms prickled when he tried to get me.
    To my astonishment he obediently moved away from the shadows and into the relative light cast by a distant security lamp. The good Lord was right: the light did set me free. The guy might have had a voice like a robust young mugger, but he wasn’t a day under ninety. Willard Scott was going to be wishing him happy birthday on national TV before it was time for me to clean the lint out of Aunt Marilyn’s dryer again.
    â€œMy name is Tony D’Angelo. I’m a neighbor. Who are you?”
    â€œKimberly McManus,” I said. For some strange reason it was the first name that popped into my mind. She’s a gal who works at Franklin’s printing shop down in Rock Hill. But it may as well be her this old codger stalked, rather than me.
    â€œThe hell you say. You’re Abby Timberlake, aren’t you?”
    â€œWho?” Perhaps I’d found that clay pot after all—hit my head on the damned thing.
    â€œAbby Timberlake. Eulonia’s niece.”
    â€œI am not.”
    â€œYou weren’t looking for this, were you?” He reached into his pocket and held up something shiny.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œHer back door key. The one hidden in the clay pot, back in those nasty hollies. Figured that’s what you were looking for.”
    â€œGive me that!” I charged at him. We were approximately the same height and weight, and except for our ages, evenly matched. I know, he was a male and might still be producing a little testosterone, but he didn’t have Buford as an ex-husband. One clear image of Buford and Tweetie doing the unspeakable in my bed, and I had enough adrenaline to run a triathlon.
    Fortunately the old coot derailed me by laughing. “Here, you can have it.”
    â€œWhat?”
    He gently tossed the key at my feet. “I suppose you have as much right to it as anybody.”
    I scooped it up, along with a handful of clay. Aunt Eulonia and grass did not get along.
    â€œYou’re damn right. What were you doing with it?”
    â€œKeeping it safe, that’s