Angel's Flight (A Mercy Allcutt Mystery) Read Free

money,” as he would have it, and that I was a dilettante who would soon tire of having to do a real job of real work, none of which assumptions were correct. Oh, very well, they were all correct except the last one.
          I wanted to work, curse it! I wanted to be useful! I didn’t want to fritter away my time being nothing more than a decoration in some wealthy Bostonian’s mansion on Beacon Hill. I’d already done that for twenty-one years. Well, I’m not sure how decorative I was, but I certainly hadn’t ever done anything worthwhile. I’d been as useless as your average appendix.
          Until I’d secured this position as Ernie’s secretary and started earning a living. Why, I’d helped rescue an abandoned child, capture a murderer, thwart a blackmailer, and liberate a kidnapped poodle during my first two weeks on the job! Not the poodle I now owned, but the one that had inspired me to buy Buttercup. Who had cost more than I earn in a week.
          I buried my head in my hands again and might well have uttered a moan, although I don’t remember.
          “Hey, kiddo, I was only joking. Why are you upset about your mother visiting?” Ernie pulled out one of the chairs in front of my desk and sat on it.
          “Well, for one thing, she didn’t know I’d cut my hair.”
          He goggled slightly. “Your hair?”
          I glared at him for a second before reburying my head in my hands. “Yes.”
          “Yeah? She was . . . uh . . . unsettled by the knowledge? I mean, is cutting one’s hair a sin or something in your family?”
          Peering at him through my fingers, suspecting him of sarcasm, I muttered, “You have no idea.”
          “Sorry, kiddo.”
          I heaved a deep and heartfelt sigh. “Oh, Ernie, she’s . . . she’s . . .” She was a battleaxe, but I couldn’t say that aloud. I settled for, “She really, really disapproves of my having a job.”
          “Well, hell, so do I,” said my irritating employer with a shrug.
          I glared at him. “That’s not fair, Ernest Templeton, and you know it. I’m a good secretary!”
          He gave me one of his cocky grins. “You’ll do. But did your mother come all the way from Boston to scold you for having a job? That’s seems kind of excessive to me.”
          This time I know I groaned because I couldn’t repress it. “She didn’t know I had a job until this morning when she showed up at Chloe’s front door just as I was leaving.”
          His eyebrows arched like soaring larks. “You didn’t tell her?”
          I shook my head. “I knew she’d disapprove. She’s always disapproved of me.”
          “She has?”
          “Yes.”
          “She disapproves of you ?”
          I didn’t particularly care for his tone of voice, but I merely gave him another, “Yes.”
          “What’s to disapprove of?”
          I gave him a smallish glare. “I’m the only person in the entire world who’s ever defied her.”
          Ernie’s eyebrows lifted into an arch of incredulity, and his lips quivered as if he were suppressing a grin.
          “It’s the truth, darn it, Ernie Templeton! Don’t you dare laugh at me! My mother considers that my holding a job as your secretary is only slightly less mortifying than if I’d gone to work for one of her society friends as a housemaid. And it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t know I’m a secretary yet.” Which made me think of something else, and I took up what was becoming my normal pose of the day with my head in my hands. “And when she finds out, she’ll be furious, because she claims my father is having an affair with his own secretary.” I’m pretty sure I whimpered.
          Ernie’s expression sobered. “Wow, I’m sorry, kiddo.”
          “It’s all right.” My voice belied the words.
          The