Mayhem at the Orient Express Read Free Page A

we didn’t think of ourselves as the League of Literary Ladies.
     Not yet, anyway. I’m pretty sure we didn’t think of ourselves as anything but royally
     pissed, not to mention inconvenienced.
    But then, that was before the murder. And the murder?
    Well, that changed everything.

2
    A library was the last place I wanted to be.
    Not that I hate books or anything, it’s just that . . . Well, it’s a pretty long story,
     and it doesn’t matter at this point, anyway. Let’s just say that I spent the weekend
     stewing about Alvin Littlejohn’s creative sentencing, and by the time Monday evening
     came around, that stew was at a rolling boil.
    At the risk of sounding too much like my across-the-street neighbor, Ms. Kate “Oh-I’m-So-Uppity”
     Wilder, I didn’t have time for reading books, much less talking about them. Add to
     that the fact that I didn’t have the patience to sit around when there was so much
     to do back at the place I called Bea & Bees (no, there were no hives in the garden
     yet, but someday I hoped there would be), and that I didn’t have the inclination to
     spend another minute in the company of my two unneighborly neighbors, and I confess,
     I almost opted for the Rambo approach. I pictured myself barricaded in at the B and
     B, eating tinned meat, chopping up the furniture for fuel, and fighting to the death
     if anybody actually noticed I hadn’t shown up at the library and came to collect me.
    Not to worry, after a few moments of dramatic daydreaming, my cooler-headed self prevailed.
     She usually does.
    After all, I reminded myself, I didn’t want to
not
comply with Alvin’s ruling and end up on the radar screen of the Put-in-Bay Police
     Department.
    With that in mind, I arrived at the room in the library basement next to the boiler
     room, the one someone with more of an imagination than a decorating budget had dubbed
     the Executive Boardroom.
    I slipped off my lightweight spring jacket and flopped into a metal chair with a gray
     plastic seat, paying little attention to the shelves that lined three of the room’s
     institutional green walls. They were stacked with books, mass-market paperbacks mostly,
     and rather than worry which of them would be our first official homework assignment,
     I took off my glasses long enough to clean them on one of those lint-free cloths and
     ran my fingers through my unruly hair. As ready as I’d ever be, I propped my elbows
     on the table, braced my chin in my hands, and waited.
    Kate was the next to arrive.
    “Oh.” Obviously, she’d expected to be the first one there, and she pulled to a stop
     just inside the door and glanced around the room as if deciding which of the chairs
     at the round table would afford her the power position within the group. Since there
     were only five chairs, it wasn’t like she had a lot of choice.
    She slapped a leather portfolio on the table and took off her tan Burberry raincoat.
     “You got here early.”
    “I just finished hanging some pictures in one of the bedroom suites at home. It seemed
     like a good place to stop for the day.”
    “I hope the room doesn’t face Chandra’s house.” Kate took a compact out of her purse,
     checked her makeup and freshened her lipstick. “She might have heard the pounding
     on the walls and figured the spirits were trying to communicate from the Other Side.”
    Hey, the woman was a royal pain, but I had to give credit where credit was due. I
     laughed.
    Kate had chosen the chair directly opposite mine, and she studied me for a moment,
     apparently trying to decide if my amusement was genuine. I guess I passed the test,
     because after she glanced over her shoulder toward the door, she leaned a little nearer.
     “You know it’s not her real name, don’t you?”
    My questioning look said
huh?
way better than words could have.
    It was Kate’s turn to laugh. She had straight, even teeth, and they were blindingly
     white. “Chandra. Our woo-woo friend. Her real