Read Online The Old Wine Shades by Martha Grimes - Free Book Online

warning.’ Harry laughed- ‘It’s just too much, isn’t it? Anyway, the wood was quite pleasant with the light falling through the branches.’ Harry looked down at his plate. ‘I don’t know why I noticed.’
    Jury smiled. ‘Because the world keeps turning. We’re made to notice, Harry.’
    ‘There was nothing sinister, nothing menacing there.’
    ‘Why did he say that, then?’
    Harry shook his head a little, as if clearing it. ‘Who?’
    ‘Your visitor, Mr. Jessup.’
    ‘I don’t know, couldn’t even hazard a guess. I assumed he was just a screwball, a character with few social skills; instead of engaging in small talk, he handed out warnings. Thinking on it, though, we thought we would stop to see him and realized we didn’t know where he lived. What he said was, ‘It’s been too many things happened there; the last was a woman and boy disappeared.’ He put his palms together and shot one hand upward, and said, ‘Like smoke, they did.’’
    ‘And he said nothing at all except to warn you you shouldn’t go tramping around in the woods?’
    Harry shook his head, drank the last of his whiskey, left beside his wineglass.
    Jury thought for a moment. ‘Where would Robbie have been when Glynnis was inspecting the house?’
    Harry shrugged and pushed his plate back. ‘I thought about that. He was probably just tagging along with his mum.’
    ‘But perhaps not. You know how kids like to explore a new place. I wonder–’ Jury sat back, let out a breath.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘–if he saw something.’
    ‘Or if Glynnis did.’
    ‘If she did.’ Jury paused. ‘The agent must have shown the house to a number of people if it had been vacant long.’
    ‘Yes, but you know how estate agents operate in the country: hand you a key and let you get on with it. A peculiar practice, it seems to me.’
    ‘What did Hugh do’ then? I mean in the weeks and months that followed.’
    • ‘As I said, he engaged a private detective when the police came up with nothing. Then he started coming apart. This puzzle-obsessed him.’
    ‘It would anyone, don’t you think?’
    ‘Yes, but it consumed Hugh. It was as if he stood in a burning building and couldn’t move, as if he were waiting for the flames. It got so that he wouldn’t leave the house, he was so afraid he’d miss the telephone call or the knock at the door. He told me he could swear he heard Mungo bark.’
    Weight beneath the table, Mungo rearranging himself.
    ‘He’d only gotten worse; he didn’t eat or sleep until his body knocked him out. I found him once by the fireplace and thought he was dead.’
    ‘No suicide attempts?’
    ‘No, not Hugh. The cook and the maid stayed on even though he forgot to pay them. I paid them when I found out. They were devoted to the family. Gone now, of course.’
    Jury nodded, twisting his wineglass. No, he didn’t want any more. He was whiskey and wine logged.
    Harry leaned back, then forward and sighed. ‘And then he could no longer live by himself. I told him that. He gave me a blank look and said, ‘But what can I do? What if Glynn and Robbie come back, what would they do if they came home and I wasn’t here?’ He seemed to regard his not being here as some sort of final, ruinous act–if he wasn’t there, they would never see one another again.’
    ‘And it was ‘when’ they come home, not ‘if?’
    ‘Yes. Hugh always thought they would.’
    ‘But he didn’t believe it completely or he wouldn’t have gone to pieces, would he?’
    ‘You know it’s strange, well not strange, exactly, but biblical or Greek, some act of God or the gods that is utterly unassailable and therefore unanswerable. Job. Oedipus Rex. Or something out of Shakespeare. I can’t explain it, but, then, perhaps one isn’t supposed to.’
    ‘That was Job’s problem, as you said.’
    ‘Strange. Hugh had always been the coolest man I ever knew. I mean that not just figuratively but literally. He was self-reliant and self-contained and