Read And One to Die On for Free Online

VILLAGE LEGAL SERVICES,” the brochures announced on their covers. Lydia got up and went to the desk to take one.
    “Do you want to sign up to talk to one of the lawyers?” the young woman with the Isro asked her.
    “No, no,” Lydia said, retreating.
    The young woman lost interest in her. Lydia sat back down on the couch and looked through the brochure. Like the sign out front, it was printed in four different languages. Lydia stuck to the English and found out that East Village Legal Services was made up of lawyers who devoted all or part of their time to providing members of the East Village community with the legal help they needed to “negotiate the system,” specializing in welfare law and “disputes with social services professionals” and battering and wife-abuse cases. At the very bottom of the English section, thick black letters spelled out IF YOU ARE A LAWYER . Underneath there was a short paragraph that said simply, “If you are a lawyer and would like to donate your time at EVLS, please contact Sherri at 212-555-2876.”
    I could devote all my time to something like East Village Legal Services, Lydia found herself thinking, at the oddest times, for days afterward. If I scaled down the way I lived, I wouldn’t have to work at all anymore. I wouldn’t have to worry about getting paid.
    It was a crazy idea, and it didn’t help her any with working out the details of the Tasheba Kent auction or getting ready to go to Maine. Lydia was even having a hard time packing. When she put her black wool dinner dress into her suit bag, she asked herself why anybody ever bothered to go to the trouble of dressing for dinner. When she zipped her mid-heeled dress pumps into the shoe pockets of her suitcase, she wondered how she could ever have decided to buy such silly shoes. Everything she did in her life was wrong, everything was silly, and nothing she tried helped her to settle down. Even her tranquilizers didn’t work. Her tranquilizers had gotten her through her divorce without so much as a headache.
    There’s something wrong with me, she thought now, staring at her desk, and it’s not natural.
    Natural or not, she had to go to Maine. She got her attaché case off the floor and began to stack her papers into it. At the end, she put in the brochure from East Village Legal Services, too. She had been carrying it with her everywhere for days, and she didn’t see why she shouldn’t bring it to Maine.
    Maybe it would operate as an antidote to all these ridiculous people she really didn’t want to see.

7
    K ELLY PRATT HAD BEEN staring all day at a piece of paper that said “Brayne Estate—Disposition,” and all it had gotten him was a backache and a throb in his head the size of the Heart That Ate Cleveland. It didn’t help that the first item under the title had been a disclaimer: “Effects of Lillian Kent, Hereinafter known as Lilith Brayne.” It helped even less that the calculations had been done well before the general use of computers, and that a couple of the figures had been corrected, by hand, in the margins. Kelly was supposed to make something sensible of this piece of paper, to present to the lawyer and to Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh, and he just hadn’t been able to do it. Now he was practically on his way up to Maine, with his suitcase packed, and his best yachting clothes laid out for him on the navy blue satin wing chair back in his bedroom, and all he could think about was what an idiot he was going to look like when the three of them got around to asking him questions.
    Kelly Pratt was a tall, broad man in his early fifties, going to paunch but hiding it well, who wished he had changed his last name at the same time he had changed his first. He had changed his first-—which had been Hubert, for God’s sake, Hubert Pratt—right after he had gotten out of the army and right before he had gone into college. Being called “Hubie” for two straight years in Korea would have been enough