Read Never Tease a Siamese: A Leigh Koslow Mystery for Free Online Page B

linoleum floor.
    "Stay here," Randall ordered. He walked carefully around and through the broken glass to the front door, opened its three separate locks, and disappeared onto the front porch. Leigh stepped forward, her eye on a brown object that had slid under one of the chairs. Skirting the shards on the floor the best she could, she reached the chair and pulled it out.
    It was a smooth rock, roughly the size of a grapefruit, and it was covered with printing from a red marker. "What is it?" Nikki asked, hustling over. "What does it say?"
    Leigh looked up, her hands shaking slightly. It had been a strange day already; this was over the top.
    "Nobody out there," Randall announced bitterly, coming back through the door. His blue scrub suit and sparse hair were completely soaked with rain, and his ordinarily unflappable face was now a pale shade of red, which Leigh knew to mean he was at his maximum anger point. He pounded across the reception area to the desk phone, now crunching glass heedlessly beneath his feet. "Twice in one weekend!" He exclaimed while he dialed, his voice strained.
    "What happened?" Nancy had come up from the basement office and stopped at the doorway, her eyes wide. Jared stood behind her, looking equally perplexed.
    "It was a rock," Leigh responded. "Somebody threw a rock through the window."
    The veterinarian's eyes fixed briefly on the object in his daughter's hands, then his call was answered. "Hello? Yes, this is Dr. Koslow at the animal clinic. We’ve been vandalized again—"
    Nikki grabbed Leigh's wrist and took a look at the rock herself. "Jeez," she muttered. "What gives?"
    Leigh wished she knew. Ricky Rhodis' little adventure might be explained away harmlessly enough, but hurtling a rock through a window was a prank of a different color; someone could have been hurt.
    Was the message intended for her father? As the clinic owner he was the obvious target, but Dr. Koslow wasn't the type of person who liked keeping other people's secrets, much less harboring ones of his own. Belatedly worrying about covering up fingerprints, she leaned down and dropped the rock on top of the chair.
    "Is that writing I saw on it?" Randall asked, hanging up the phone and crunching back across the room.
    It was no accident that Leigh had dropped the rock print-side down. She faced her father and nodded grimly. "It says, ' If the truth comes out—I'll kill you.'"
     
     
     
    Chapter 4
     
    The rain had let up by evening, and as Leigh climbed out of the Cavalier in church dress number one, she was glad. She had no idea what type of apparel one wore to a will-reading, particularly when nobody was completely sure the individual in question was dead. But she figured a nice, blue, hundred-percent cotton number could pass by in most crowds without drawing an eyebrow.
    She paused a moment beside her car to ogle the Murchison mansion. By modern suburban standards, its square footage was nothing to brag about. But in terms of aura, the house was huge. It was one of the oldest and stateliest mansions in the distinguished riverside borough of Ben Avon, and that was nothing to sneeze at. A dark, second-empire creation with three stories, a mansard roof, and ghoulish-looking bracketing around the large windows and under the eaves, it evoked images of everything from haunted wine cellars to dusty attics filled with dotty old uncles. Like most houses on the steep, populated river bluff, it had little yard to speak of, but every inch of what it did have was ruthlessly hemmed in by dense, aging shrubbery. The main entrance was not even visible from the road, as the narrow brick walk zigzagged through a series of tall hedgerows. Even the entrance to the quaint two-story garage was concealed; the driveway pulled off from the side road at an acute angle and immediately disappeared behind a line of evergreens.
    Lilah Murchison liked her privacy.
    Leigh hadn't taken a step before a disturbingly familiar sedan rattled up behind her,