Tickled to Death Read Free Page A

to bother to go to the office because they won’t let me see Dick. If I knew the name of Dick’s lawyer, I could at least call him. Should I hunt through his drawers for an address book?”
    “Dick can call his lawyer himself.” I paused to sort through her babbled words. “He was taken away for questioning, you said? He wasn’t arrested?”
    “What difference does it make?” she wailed.
    “It makes a big difference, Luanne. Have they found new evidence to link him to his wife’s”—I made myself use the word least likely to send her into more wails of desperation—“accident?”
    “Gannet didn’t say. He just showed up at the door, ordered Dick to get dressed, and then put him in the car and drove away. Dick has a rifle in the closet. I’m going to drive over there and demand that they let me speak to Dick.”
    “No!” I gripped the receiver and frantically tried to think how to deter my best friend from being gunned down in the doorway of the sheriff’s office. “Under no circumstances are you to so much as open the closet door. Give me directions to the house. I’ll leave here as soon as I can track down Caron so she can mind the store.”
    She gushed with gratitude, then rattled off highway numbers, county road numbers, turns onto roads that lacked numbers, and an admonishment to watch for deer during the last fewmiles. I reiterated my promise, hung up, and called Caron at Inez’s house.
    “I have plans,” she said, unmoved by my plea. “It was whispered last night that my body is the precise color of bread, which certain people found hilarious. The sun is shining. I intend to lie out and finish that book about pubic hair. I shall resemble toast by the end of the afternoon, and Rhonda can just take her tacky—”
    “You’ll have to do it tomorrow,” I said, equally unmoved. “Luanne needs my help, and I cannot close the store on a Saturday. If you want to keep yourself in suntan oil, you’d better get over here in the next fifteen minutes.”
    Caron’s compassion runs no deeper than her epidermis, but she is aware of the relationship between business activity and her own well-developed materialism. She and Inez arrived half an hour later. I gave one the feather duster and the other a lecture about not reading aloud from anything racier than Dr. Seuss, grabbed my scrawled directions, and left for Turnstone Lake, which was about forty miles from Farberville.
    I followed the numbers easily, but once I left the pavement for a series of dirt roads, I became confused. Luanne had mentioned signs nailed on a post. There was no post. If I’d passed another car, or an inhabited dwelling, I could have asked directions, but as it was, I felt as though I’d abandoned society for some sort of primeval immersion. The sloping woods were dappled withsunlight. Orange hawkweed bloomed in the shadowy retreats, and black-eyed Susans lined the ditches. A hawk circled high above a hilltop.
    I might have enjoyed this incursion into nature, but I was keenly aware that I couldn’t even find the lake. I wadded up the paper with the directions and tossed it into the backseat, gritted my teeth, and started turning left or right at each opportunity. My hatchback shuddered as I careened down and up the increasingly bad roads until I was on nothing better than a logging trail. The only water I’d encountered was a mushy puddle that left blinding brown splashes on the hood and windshield. I, a renowned amateur sleuth who’d utilized the smallest of clues to expose heinous crimes and unspeakable treachery (or an abundance of greed, anyway), was incapable of finding a large lake. Had my ego been less fragile, I might have found the experience humbling.
    I ran the wipers until I could see between the streaks, then took off once more. Several turns later I spotted a stout woman dressed in a wrinkled skirt, a baggy sweatshirt, heavy leather shoes, and a molded plastic pith helmet. As I stopped next to her, she turned and