Read Date for Murder for Free Online Page B

coughed until air replaced the water she had swallowed, and then she turned away and was violently sick in the bushes. When she faced the pool again her face was deathly white and her eyes tremendous and dark against the pallor.
    Leona, across the pool, had not moved. She spoke with slow amusement. “Take a bit down the wrong pipe?”
    Idell crossed the pool toward her. She collapsed into the chair, strength completely leaving her knees with startling suddenness.
    “Someone is drowned in the pool,” she said. Her voice sounded odd and far away to her ears; she felt strangely impersonal. “It’s Link.”
    Leona’s hands tightened on the sides of her chair and she drew herself straight. Her eyes held surprise; it was the first time Idell could remember having seen more than a fleeting expression on her usually impassive face.
    “Drowned? In the pool?” She sucked in her breath. “It can’t be! It’s impossible!”
    “See for yourself,” Idell said. “I came face to face with it—he’s horrible.” She shuddered. “Why is it impossible? Last night you told me how everyone hated—” She stopped. “We have to get him up, and call a doctor or something.” She didn’t feel calloused, unemotional toward this thing, just in an impersonal sort of daze, sick from the shock and the vomiting and still moving wholly without volition of her own. It was an odd, distant feeling, and she would never forget it.
    Leona rose. “Yes, I suppose we had.” She was herself again, capable, aloof.
    They went around to the far side of the pool. Idell paused by the ladder. “He must have hit his head diving or something,” she said. “I think he’s caught in the rungs some way. I’ll loosen him and try to pull him to the top. Maybe we can drag him out together. I’ll push and you pull.”
    Leona seemed wholly unconcerned; it was as if she were discussing an inanimate object rather than a man who had been breathing, talking, drinking a short while before. “If you can drag him across to the other side it will be easier,” she said. “There’s more space to work there.”
    Idell looked down at the narrow path that ran between the edge of the pool and the bushes on that side, and nodded. How odd she felt, how distant from all this. She took a deep breath, fought the icy chill that threatened again to make gelatine of her muscles and dove deep into the water.
    Trying to keep her mind from it, her eyes from the staring, horrible face, she turned and swam toward the ladder. She circled, so she came toward the body from the side, away from the face. It was then she saw the rope. It was lashed around his waist, holding him against the ladder, tied to a rung. The realization of the meaning of that rope was not long in reaching Idell. It was almost as if she had expected it all along!
    Not accident, but murder!
    Her fingers fought with the water-soaked knot of the common cotton rope. She gave no thought that this was evidence, that she should leave it until the police took charge. She gave no thought to the police. She only wanted to get Link’s body from the pool—and then get as far from it as she could. She wanted to wash her mind of the clinging mould of death, and her body of the water which held that death.
    The knot came loose at last. She left the rope about his waist, the ends which had been tied to the ladder rung trailing free. She grasped him beneath the armpits, and thrust herself upward.
    It was not until her head broke the surface and air rushed into her lungs that she realized how long she had held her breath. It was a moment before she could force herself to lie on her back and kick her way across the pool, with Link’s cold flesh against hers.
    She thought almost idiotically, “It’s a good thing I was a girl scout once. I never could do this otherwise.”
    At last she reached the side of the pool where Leona waited and, after a struggle that took most of her strength, managed to turn him so the ends of the