Read Murder at a Vineyard Mansion for Free Online

of the second were already closed in, and a third story had been framed. A wide porch surrounded the house and a large second-story balcony faced the sea. The house was being built in a Victorian style more typical of Oak Bluffs than of Edgartown, and it was going to be huge.
    Every window in the house seemed to have been broken, including the leaded, stained-glass panes of a miniature version of the Chartres rose window over the front door. It had taken a good deal of time to do all that damage and must have made a certain amount of noise. I wondered if any of the neighbors had heard anything.
    I ducked under the police tape and went into the house. Even though it was in the early stages of construction, I could see that it was going to be a first-class structure, with no money being spared by its owner. There was a massive cellar space, and a carved and curved staircase led to the second floor. The kitchen was big enough for a half dozen cooks, and its stove, refrigerator, freezer, sinks, and cabinets, all still in their boxes, were the finest made. There were two boxed dishwashers and the counters were topped with stone.
    I went through the place from top to bottom, touching nothing but the occasional doorknob. I couldn’t be sure, but the faucets in the bathrooms seemed to be made of gold.
    I walked around the porch and looked at the grounds, wondering where watchman Ollie Mattes had encountered his nemesis. There was no way for me to tell. One thing was certain, though: there were blunt instruments aplenty near at hand, in the form of tools and lengths of wood and pipe.
    I thought about Ollie Mattes, and about the gold faucets, and about Harold Hobbes.
    Then I heard the sound of a vehicle coming up the driveway, and trotted back to the lip of the bluff, where I slid down out of sight then peeked back over. J. W. Jackson, master spy. The vehicle was a middle-aged station wagon driven by a woman. She parked and got out and looked at the house. I guessed she was about forty, but I can never really tell how old people are these days. Thanks to clothing styles, hair dye and makeup, diet, exercise, and plastic surgery, some daughters look older than their mothers, and some fathers look younger than their sons.
    This woman’s blonde hair was shoulder length and she was wearing casual clothes that were not new but that had been expensive when purchased. Two of the ways you can tell the difference between rich girls and poor girls is that poor girls have long hair and rich girls don’t, and that poor girls like to wear the newest clothes they can afford and rich girls don’t. Another difference is that rich girls walk like they’re carrying field-hockey sticks and poor girls don’t. Rich girls also have bigger chins a lot of the time but that didn’t apply in this case. This woman’s chin was normal, but there was no doubt that she was a rich girl.
    I didn’t know who she was, but then I don’t know most of the people on Martha’s Vineyard, especially the rich girls. I memorized the license plate on the station wagon then ducked down as the woman took her eyes off the house and swung them in my direction. It seemed a good time to retreat, so I did that, stepping carefully and doing some sliding down the slope, preceded by bouncing stones and small avalanches of dirt and sand. On the beach I dusted myself off and joined my children at the water’s edge.
    Diana had not mastered the art of skipping stones and was getting tired of trying.
    Part of her problem was that her stones weren’t flat enough. Nobody can skim a round rock. I found some flat ones.
    â€œHere,” I said, giving her one that was the right size for her little hand. “My father called these ‘donies’ when I was a kid. When we threw rocks he called it flinging donies. We called slingshots donie flingers. This game was called skipping donies. Watch the way Joshua is doing it. See? He throws sidearm