The Twenty-Three 3 (Promise Falls) Read Free Page B

heart.”
    “Come with me, sir,” she said, leading him to the back of the ambulance. She’d put him in there with Audrey.
    The more the merrier, she thought, shaking her head, then wondering, What next?
    Which was when she heard the explosion.
    When Emily Townsend had her first sip of coffee, she thought it tasted just a tiny bit off.
    So she dumped out the entire pot—six cups’ worth—as well as the filter filled with coffee grounds, and started over.
    Ran the water for thirty seconds from the tap to make sure it was fresh before adding it to the machine. Put in a new filter and six scoops of coffee from the tin.
    Hit the button.
    Waited.
    When the machine beeped, she poured the coffee into a cup—a clean one; she’d already put the first one into the dishwasher—added one sugar and just a titch of cream, and gave it a stir.
    Brought the warm mug to her lips and tentatively sipped.
    Must have been her imagination. This tasted just fine.
    Maybe it was her toothpaste. Made that first cup taste funny.
    Cal Weaver was having breakfast—if you could call it that—in a room adjacent to the lobby of the BestBet Inn, which sat on Route 9 a quarter mile from the exit off 87, halfway between Promise Falls and Albany.
    He’d been here most of the week.
    It wasn’t a surveillance or any other kind of private detecting gig that had brought him to the lovely accommodations of the Best-Bet ( Free Wi-Fi! ). It was, however, the only affordable hotel close to Promise Falls that had any rooms available. He’d booked himself in here while he looked for a new place to live. Someone had firebombed the bookstore below his apartment and while his place had not burned to the ground, it was not a place where anyone could stay. The smell of smoke was overwhelming, and power had been cut to the building.
    Cal was not going to stay with his sister, Celeste, and her husband, Dwayne. His presence would aggravate the tensions that already existed between his sister and his brother-in-law. The man did road repairs for the town, and with all the recent budget cuts, he was getting very little work.
    So Cal found a hotel.
    The BestBet advertised a free breakfast, and it was true what they said. You get what you pay for. The first day, when Cal came down, he was thinking he’d get a ham and cheddar omelet with home fries and brown toast. So he was dismayed when he found that his breakfast choices consisted of single-serving cereals insealed plastic containers, hard-boiled eggs (preshelled, which he supposed was at least something), day-old muffins and donuts, bananas and oranges, containers of yogurt, and—praise the Lord—coffee.
    The only time any hotel employee showed up was to make sure there was coffee in the tall, aluminum urn.
    Miracle of miracles, it was drinkable.
    He’d grabbed a free copy of the Albany paper in the lobby and was leafing through it, sitting at a table by the window so he could watch the traffic go by on 9, washing down a dry blueberry muffin with his paper cup of coffee. He’d already refilled it twice.
    He hadn’t expected to find any Promise Falls apartment-for-rent listings in the paper, and he was not disappointed. And since there was no longer a Promise Falls Standard , he’d turn to the Net after breakfast to see whether any new places had come online.
    His cell rang.
    He reached into his pocket, checked out the caller.
    Lucy Brighton.
    It was not the first time she’d tried to reach him since he’d last seen her earlier in the week. He’d taken a couple of her calls, but had ignored the more recent ones. He knew what Lucy was going to say, what she was going to ask him. It would be the same thing she had asked him the time before.
    What was he going to do?
    He still didn’t know.
    Should he tell the police what he knew? Should he call up his old friend Promise Falls police detective Barry Duckworth, and tell him he knew who had murdered Miriam Chalmers?
    Cal knew he probably should. But he wasn’t