Read Book of Shadows for Free Online

and let it all out before saying, “Ellie, I loved Nat, too. I couldn’t have made it in this town without you two. I came back from Hollywood flat broke and feeling sorry for myself and you two did everything from paying my rent to decorating my apartment. I’m not about to forget it. I owe you both and I owe you big, so that’s why I telephoned Sergeant Laura and told him about the couple Nat drove off with. Laura’s the local law, what there is of it in that section of New Jersey.”
    “And?”
    “He says he checked the barn, the house, the grounds, and there’s nothing to indicate that Nat wasn’t alone when he died. The only other person in the picture, the man who delivered the mares, was accounted for.”
    Ellie Shields said, “His truck broke down. He’d gone to town to get new bridles and someone told him his wife was in the hospital. That turned out to be a sick joke. His wife was at home and he made the trip to the hospital for nothing. There were witnesses to all of this. I still don’t get what you’re driving at. I have to tell you, Marisa, this kind of talk upsets me. I mean it’s bad enough that he’s dead. Now you’re trying to—”
    Marisa gripped Ellie Shields by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Ellie, I put off making that call for two days—two whole days, and every minute of it I felt like a shit. I had to make that call, I had to know. So now I do. Sergeant Laura says there was no one else on the property. Nat was alone.”
    Ellie kissed Marisa’s hand and wet it with her tears. “You’re only trying to help. I know, I know. But it’s like I told you: That couple were probably customers and Nat dropped them off before driving to the farm. God, I hate that place even more now. All I want to do is get rid of it. I never want to see it again.”
    But Marisa was thinking. He left the shop early, too early. He never locked up and that’s not like Nat. The white-haired man was driving Nat’s station wagon, and since when do you let a customer drive your car? Nat was the politest man in the world, yet he never answered when I called his name. At the time he seemed drugged, in another world. Why did a careful, precise man like Nat Shields go off without properly locking up his shop? Why did he go off when he knew I was coming right back? Why?
    She dismissed those thoughts immediately. Melodramatic, overdrawn, exaggerated. Of course. Too many soap-opera scripts lodged in her subconscious. True, the tall woman had looked at Marisa as if she wanted to tear her heart out and feed it to a dog, but in New York people looked at each other that way and worse every day of the week.
    But not much worse.
    Customers. As Ellie said, they’d just been customers taking Nat to see an item too large to be carried into the shop.
    Marisa watched Ellie stand up and walk over to Louie and pat his large head. Ellie said, “You don’t know how I’m looking forward to being numb, just plain numb. At the moment it’s—it’s all so fresh and I’m feeling it. Feeling too much.”
    She looked at Marisa. “You know who’s taking this even harder than me? Larry. He really loved Nat. Larry’s broken up; he’s had to be sedated twice and he hasn’t been out of his apartment since the funeral. You and I have talked about this, Marisa, about how women feel about fags. I understand you’re not supposed to call them that.”
    “You’re forgiven.”
    “Thank you. I mean fags either reject you or compete with you, but Larry—well, him I could tolerate. Nat had his ‘toys,’ his ‘adventures,’ as he called them, and I learned to live with it. Those pretty boys with their vapid smiles and all of them wanting to be actors or painters or dancers and none of them with an iota of talent. Larry was somewhat different, more vulnerable than the rest, less conniving. I could tolerate him. Poor Larry. At the moment he’s living on Valium and Preparation H.”
    “Preparation H? That’s for hemorrhoids,