A Dismal Thing To Do Read Free

the shambles around her, the yellowish glow from the lamp and the bit of red showing through the stove’s open damper made the room seem almost cozy. Janet was tired, she realized, more tired than she ought to be. Now that she had nothing to do but sit and count her aches and pains, she discovered quite a few. Lots of bruises, no doubt, from getting the barn dumped on her. Madoc would have a fit.
    Whatever had been in the truck to create such a blast? Could an exploding gas tank knock down a building a fair distance away? That had been no great tractor trailer, just a truck. A top-heavy truck. Janet could see it well enough even now, lying there across the road with its roof in the snowbank. Like a horse box, she thought. High in proportion to its length. Bigger, of course. A giraffe box? Silly! A moving van. A van for moving giraffes. This must be terrible brandy.
    And why had the explosion been so long in coming? Janet was sure she’d seen no sign of fire while she was standing there wondering how to get up to the cab. She’d had time to back her car down to the barn, time to get inside. The person in the cab had had time to get out, time to run down and make a safe getaway in her car.
    Why should there have been an explosion at all? The truck hadn’t crashed, it hadn’t lost a wheel or snapped an axle, it had simply tipped over and nestled into the snow. Janet couldn’t even remember its making any noise to amount to anything.
    But there must have been something. Damage to the body on the side she’d never got to see? Inflammable cargo? Acid dripping out of broken carboys into—what? Crates of kitchen matches? If the driver had hijacked the truck, he might not have known how to drive it properly, and that was why it tipped over. Maybe he’d then set the fire himself before he ran off, trying to cover up what he’d done. Anybody who’d steal a lone woman’s lovely new car and leave her stranded in the middle of nowhere when she’d only been trying to save his life would do anything. Janet finished her brandy and went to sleep.

Chapter 2
    S HE WOKE AT HALF-PAST seven on the dot. Her watch said so. That meant she’d been stuck on this hill for four solid hours, and still nobody had come. Unless there’d been cars going by while she slept. But how could they? That mass of wreckage must still be blocking the road. They’d have honked or got out and tried to move it, or seen her lamp and come here to ask what had happened. Besides, she hadn’t been asleep so very long, probably not more than an hour by the time she’d been held up by the wreck, blown down with the barn, waited around all that time for the fire to go out so she could get in here and do the various things she’d done before she nodded off.
    She had to go and do one of them again pretty quick. She must have caught a chill in her kidneys standing around out there with wet feet. She’d better fetch in more firewood while she was about it. Sighing, Janet stuck her feet back into her boots, warm and fairly dry inside by now, thank the Lord, picked up her security blanket for company, and dragged herself back to the woodshed.
    What the heck had she been dreaming, anyway? Something about dinosaurs prowling around outside, making strange noises. That must have been the wind. Up here, with nothing to break its force, it was roaring loud enough to wake the dead. If she were to get stuck in this old shack all night, she’d have to hump some to keep herself from freezing.
    But first things first. Janet was attending to her most urgent need when all of a sudden she heard voices beyond the door she’d instinctively closed. And here she was, the wife of a detective inspector in the RCMP, with her panty hose down around her knees.
    That embarrassing circumstance no doubt saved her life. Now they were in the kitchen, two men, talking plenty loud enough to hear.
    And the first thing she heard was “Did he have sense enough to kill the woman before he took her