A Chill Rain in January Read Free Page B

station.”
    â€œIt’s not my office I want cleaned,” said Alberg. “It’s my house. In Gibsons.” Gibsons Landing is a town about twenty miles south of Sechelt.
    She gazed at him curiously. “You got no wife, huh?” She was perspiring a lot.
    â€œI’m divorced,” said Alberg. Her face clouded instantly with suspicion. “Oh, well,” said Alberg to himself. He stood up. “I don’t need to keep you any longer, Mrs. Stratidakis. Thank you for coming. Isabella will be in touch with you.”
    He closed the door after her, counted to thirty, opened it, and thundered, “Isabella!” When she appeared he said, “What the hell happened to that woman’s head?”
    â€œI hadn’t met her myself,” said Isabella. “She’d be a good hard worker, I’m told.”
    â€œShe doesn’t like police officers,” he said sullenly. “She doesn’t approve of divorced men.”
    â€œMy hubby gave me her name. He treated her son.” Isabella’s husband was a chiropractor.
    â€œPromise me, Isabella, that you won’t usher in another single damn candidate unless you’ve seen her first with your own beautiful golden eyes.” He crumpled the list and tossed it in the wastepaper basket.
    â€œYou can trust me,” she said. Then, solemnly, she handed him a telephone message. She thrust some wayward strands of long auburn hair into the makeshift bun at the back of her head. “I heard she was back,” she said, nodding, and eased herself out of the office.
    Alberg picked up the phone and dialed the library.
    â€œYou’re back,” he said, when Cassandra Mitchell answered. “Jesus. Finally.”
    â€œHow are you, Karl?”
    â€œA whole lot better than I was a couple of minutes ago. How was England?”
    â€œGreat. Terrific. But I’m glad to be home. It feels like I’ve been gone for years.’
    â€œYou have. Years.” Actually she’d been away only four months, but it had felt like years to Alberg. “When am I going to see you?” She sounded incredibly sexy, over the phone. “How about tonight?”
    â€œI have to see my mother tonight. But I wondered, do you want to have lunch?”
    His office door opened and Isabella stood there, white-faced, wringing her hands.
    â€œYeah. Lunch. That’s great.”
    â€œKarl,” said Isabella. She never called him Karl.
    â€œI have to go, Cassandra. I’ll see you at noon,” said Alberg, and hung up.
    â€œWhat is it?” He went to her quickly, thinking about car crashes, and Isabella’s seventeen-year-old son.
    But it wasn’t Isabella’s son.
    It was Ramona Orlitzki.

Chapter 6
    T HERE WAS no facility in Sechelt designed to look after elderly people incapable of caring for themselves. So they were housed on the top floor of the hospital. And that’s where Ramona Orlitzki ended up.
    Ramona was in her mid-seventies, tall and thin, with scrimpy hair and quick hands.
    Her husband, whose name was Anton, had died in 1980, and for several years after that Ramona lived happily by herself in a cottage next to the sea. The cottage was too cold in the worst days of winter, but there weren’t many of those, and she had a good, reliable heater.
    Ramona read voraciously. She particularly liked books with a lot of robust, juicy sex in them and would ask Cassandra Mitchell, the librarian, to keep her eye peeled for the kind of thing Ramona would enjoy.
    She was fond of saying, when her health was inquired after, that at her age she could expect anything but pregnancy; and then she’d laugh, squeezing up her face and wheezing, producing no actual laughter, just a lot of wheezing, and people watched, smiling but tense, and were relieved when Ramona recovered, wiped her eyes, and winked. She wore many layers of clothing all the time, all year long, and in this she resembled her friend