Read Online The Trouble with Harriet by Dorothy Cannell - Free Book Online

what he considered good and sufficient financial reasons. Had she latched on to Daddy because she felt safer with a man in tow? And what if—I stumbled on taking the last stair—those creeps were now after him because he knew something he didn’t realize he knew that would land them in the soup? I was suddenly thinking about that man who had given Daddy a push getting on the escalator at the airport. And how his companion had picked up Daddy’s suitcase. Talk about losing my fragile grip on common sense! Did I need to remind myself that such accidents happened? Hadn’t my mother died from a fall down a flight of stairs at a London railway station?
    I was brought back to the moment by a thud. It was incurred by Ben’s walking into the suitcase that Freddy had left standing in the middle of the landing, which we rather grandly referred to as the gallery. That’s what Mrs. Malloy had insisted it should be called. In hopes, I think, that her portrait would one day hang on its main wall and people with guidebooks in their hands would strain against the velvet ropes in attempts to glean what lay behind her enigmatic smile. There was, however, nothing ambiguous about Daddy’s bellow of alarm as the urn—to give the clay pot its due—tilted sideways with a bounce of its lid before Ben righted himself in what could easily have passed for slow motion.
    “Whoops!” Freddy shook his head, smacking me in the eye with his ponytail. Fortunately, he didn’t lose contact with the decanter.
    “That was a silly place to leave the case,” I told him, being in one of those moods when I had to nitpick.
    “Where else could I have put it?” He looked at me with reproach.
    “Up against the wall wouldn’t have been a bad idea.”
    “I didn’t know which room you had picked for Uncle.”
    “Do you two want to stand around quarreling while Morley and I take a taxi the rest of the way?” Ben sounded thoroughly fed up, and it belatedly occurred to me that this hadn’t been the best of all days for him, either. He’d been looking forward to the trip to France even more than I had. Yet in the blink of an eye he’d had to come to terms with the fact that not only wasn’t he going to Gay Paree; his home had been turned into a morgue.
    Opening the door closest to me, I said: “I thought Daddy could sleep in here. The bed’s made up, and it has the best view of the sea.”
    A silly thing to have mentioned. Given his present disconsolate state, my father probably shouldn’t be encouraged to hang out of second-floor windows. He had talked about ending it all when Mummy had died but had decided to wait until he had lost a few pounds so that I wouldn’t be put to the expense of a large coffin. Not that he’d been a fifth of his present size at that time. Fortunately, the mood had passed, possibly because Freddy’s mother had pointed out that my mother might be enjoying the opportunity to make her own way in the next world. Aunt Lulu was a twit in many ways, but she had her moments. It cheered me a little to remember that Daddy hadn’t made light of Mummy’s passing.
    The bedroom we entered had neutral wallpaper with matching curtains and a beige carpet. Innocuous would best describe it. But my father immediately prowled around the space between the foot of the bed and the dressing table like a disgruntled bear in a cage while never taking his eyes off Ben, who was still holding the urn.
    “What’s the prob, Uncle?” Freddy put the coffeepot and decanter down on a trunk that served for a table and elbowed me aside to flop down in an easy chair.
    “Harriet wouldn’t have liked this room.” Daddy’s lips flapped in distaste.
    “Wouldn’t she?” I was tempted to say that it was fortunate her powers of observation had been curtailed, but with the urn right there in our midst, that would have made me a poor hostess.
    “She wouldn’t have liked that fox-hunting picture.”
    “She didn’t have the killer