Read A Deadly Snow Fall for Free Online

family from New York grown sick of the
hustle bustle of the city. Daphne told me that it was where Edwin
Snow III had eaten his breakfast every day, for years. She’d added
that none of the waitresses but DeeDee Bradford would wait on the
difficult old man. It seemed to be a place to start.
    As it was not very busy, I asked DeeDee if
she could tell me a little about the dead man. She looked around to
see if any of her customers needed her and finding that everyone
was still busy eating, she sat with us in the booth.
    DeeDee’s story was captivating. Even Edwin
Snow’s eating habits were weird. “Every morning at seven minutes to
eight he arrived. Folks could set their watches to his schedule. He
checked around until he discovered a booth or table where a
previous customer had left the daily Provincetown Banner or the
Boston Globe and there he sat. I was the only waitperson who’d
still wait on him by the time he…died. The others refused to go
near the fussy man.”
    “What was he so fussy about DeeDee?” asked
Daphne.
    “Everything, but mostly his food. If you
could call what he ate food. I mean, he ignored all the great stuff
on the menu and ordered the very same thing every day. You know,
sometimes I’d start feeling sorry for the lonely old man and then
he’d just go and do something so outrageous that I’d go back to
disliking him. But, I was sweet as honey and always smiled at the
old goat. Might have saved up those smiles for a rainy day. He
never smiled back, of course.”
    “What did he order?” I asked DeeDee.
    “Three pieces of burnt toast with no butter
but with a “thin skin” of orange marmalade. He’d say, ‘As thin as
tissue paper.” Trouble was, he said the exact same thing, day after
day, as if I was a dumbbell with a lobotomy and couldn’t remember
something so damned simple. Then he’d add, ‘and don’t knock off any
of the crispy edges, I want my full money’s worth.’ Can you
imagine?”
    “Did he drink coffee or tea?” My inner
amateur sleuth was most certainly awakening, burgeoning inside my
head. Every question was meant to add a new detail to the profile
of the recently dead man. I was becoming a hybrid of my favorite
small village sleuths. Then it struck me like a welcome thunder
bolt. If I could not dig into ancient tombs and catacombs and
buried religious sites, I could dig into a possible murder. A surge
of delight raced through my mind as I was pulled back to the
fascinating subject at hand.
    “Get ready for a really good laugh.” DeeDee
laughed herself as we awaited some gem.
    “He always ordered a cup of hot water and the
ketchup bottle. Yup, made his own mix-in-place tomato soup. Is that
a hoot or what? Guess you’re not supposed to laugh about the dead
but, hey, the man was a trip. Get this, he paid in small change.
Yup, had an old leather change purse full of it. Never carried a
single bill. He went to the bank every other Monday regularly and
withdrew forty dollars in small change. My sister works at the
bank. Lived on next to nothing although everyone knows, er…knew he
was rich as Croesus.”
    DeeDee drifted off for a second then returned
to the present. “I was just remembering something odd I once saw
when he went to pay the bill. Never tipped, of course. Mrs. Beasley
always slipped me what the tip ought to be. Well, anyway, he pulled
out some dimes and nickels and in the process, he dropped something
on the floor. I leaned down to pick it up for the old coot. It was
a torn-in-half tarot card. That creepy one with the grim reaper on
it. The death card.”
    DeeDee went off to wait on another customer
and Daphne and I sat talking. Daphne had her own Edwin Snow stories
to impart.
    “Everyone knows the man inherited a bundle of
money from his equally mean father. But, get this; the man was so
stingy he refused to pay for either rubbish pickup or a dump
sticker so he could take his own to the, as it is now called, the
disposal area. So he snuck around after