A Widow's Curse Read Free Page B

fans actually made the air in the house look foggy, even when I opened the windows upstairs and down.
    There was little need to clean or even straighten up the first floor of my little cabin in the sky. I always kept it neat as a pin, in the great southern tradition: As long as the living room is clean for unexpected company, it doesn’t matter what the rest of the house looks like. Alas, for me, the living room and the dining room, as well as the parlor and the kitchen, were all basically one big room. Bronzed oak beams framed the room. A larger-than-normal galley kitchen lay to the right as you came in the front door. A cast-iron stove had been set into the stone hearth to the left by a large picture window when I was a boy. Quilts on the walls suggested a stained-glass brightness; the staircase in the far corner led up to the bedrooms.
    I gave the downstairs a quick inspection, then spent the rest of the day in research, hoping to be prepared for what Shultz was bringing me.
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    Around sunset, shortly after I’d remembered to shower and get into a nice black T-shirt and jeans, I heard a car pull up in the front yard. Two men emerged, both talking nearly at the same time, and loudly.
    â€œPure shite!” Andrews bellowed. “In a bucket!”
    â€œYou can say that all you want,” the other man, presumably Shultz, answered pleasantly, “but I read the book and you have to at least acknowledge that some people in the world agree with me. I mean, I didn’t make up this crap, right?”
    I threw open my screen door and attacked the front steps.
    â€œThis moron,” Andrews moaned to me before I could say anything, “thinks that Bacon wrote Shakespeare because somewhere one of the sonnets secretly spells out the word pyg —with a y !”
    Andrews was dressed in his customarily inappropriate mountain-visiting costume: cutoff shorts, loud Hawaiian shirt, and tennis shoes.
    â€œ Pig with a y ?” I was completely in the dark.
    â€œBecause where do you get bacon ?” Andrews shouted.
    Light dawned.
    â€œFrom a pig.” I turned to Shultz. “And you think…”
    â€œ I don’t think anything,” replied Shultz, correcting me. “I was just telling Dr. Know-It-All that the theory was, in fact, advanced by the Bacon family, and massively researched.”
    â€œ Dr. Know-It-All ,” I said calmly, “least loved of the James Bond movies.”
    â€œYou were right,” Shultz said to Andrews, warming. “He does look a little like an albino.”
    Shultz had decided on the more ordinary flannel shirt, chinos, and hiking boots, expecting it to be colder than it was. His red hair was desperately receded and he was a bit on the heavy side, in his midfifties.
    â€œExcept for the eyes,” Andrews pointed out. “He doesn’t have albino eyes.”
    â€œYou have to be Dr. Devilin,” Shultz said, extending his hand to me.
    â€œI suppose I have to be. I offered my hand, as well.
    â€œAnd I must be…going to the bathroom,” Andrews said, breezing by me, blond hair flying backward. “Did you know that the so-called scenic route to your little blue heaven is neither scenic nor much of a route, and takes almost twice as long as the way I usually go? I have to pee like a pistol.”
    And he disappeared into my house, leaving Shultz and me to complete our hand-shaking moment in silence.
    â€œSo,” I offered at last, “need help with your bags?”
    â€œNope. Only got the one.” He reached into the car. “I discovered once, on a trip to Europe, actually, that you generally wear the same pair of pants for, like, a week before changing. Two or three shirts that work with one jacket, two pair of shoes, enough clean underwear and socks, and everything I need for a month’s vacation fits into this one light item.”
    He held up a battered leather travel bag only about twice the size of an