Read St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder for Free Online

list.”
    “Good.” She smiled. “If I found out otherwise, I would be very hurt.”
    And Shilling would never see another dime of Crawford’s millions.
    Both of them knew it.
    Neither of them was rude enough to say it out loud.

6
    BLESSING, ARIZONA
SEPTEMBER 12
LATE MORNING
    S heriff Ned Purcell rocked his high-backed chair away from the desk and stared at the ceiling.
    “The fire was almost a month ago, Miss Breck. The ruling has already been made. Your great-aunt died in an unfortunate accident.”
    “I understand,” Jill said evenly. “But considering her note to me, and the convenient loss of one of our family paintings, I feel we should look at things again.”
    “Miss…” He bit back an impatient word and looked out the window. The Breck women had been nothing but trouble for a century. Ornery to the bone. “In the big scheme of things, Modesty probably had a part in her own death. Old ladies who live alone shouldn’t try to pour fuel oil into a stove that’s already burning.”
    Jill straightened her back against the wooden chair on the other side of the sheriff’s desk. She was real tired of hearing how women shouldn’t be living without the protection and oversight of a man. That point of view was one of the biggest reasons she’d rarely looked back after leaving the Arizona Strip for a college scholarship in California.
    “Great-aunt Modesty was born on that ranch,” Jill said. “She livedwith that stove her whole life. She was used to doing her own chores, including maintaining old engines and pouring fuel oil, branding and cutting and haying. Frankly, I was having a hard time accepting that she tripped and scattered burning fuel oil all over the kitchen. Then, when I found her note and the old trunk, I really felt the whole matter should be looked at again.”
    Purcell picked up the cream-colored Stetson that was as much a part of his uniform as the tooled leather belt with its gun, nightstick, handcuffs, and bullets.
    Jill waited. She knew she was irritating the sheriff, but she couldn’t just let all the questions go because the man believed at a gut level that a woman living alone would naturally come to a bad end.
    “Maybe Modesty had just been lucky all these years,” Purcell said bluntly. “A woman like her isn’t supposed to live alone.”
    A combination of triumph and anger burned in Jill. She hated the assumption of every woman’s inferiority to any man.
    “I’m not sure I follow,” she said.
    Purcell leaned forward on his elbows. His face was clean-shaven, surprisingly pale for a man who spent so much time outdoors. His lips were thin and flat. He wore a white, pearl-buttoned Western shirt, jeans, cowboy boots, and a bolo tie. He was an elected rural lawman who ran for office every day of his term and dressed accordingly.
    “Modesty Breck was a pain in the side to the folks around here,” Purcell said. “She flaunted views that decent people in this county find offensive. More than one person came to me, saying that they thought she was incompetent, that she ought to have more supervision, particularly in her declining years.”
    “And there are those who thought she should have had more supervision, especially in her younger days,” Jill shot back. “Some people can’t abide the thought that a woman should choose never tomarry, or worse, to leave a church-sanctified marriage and live on her own.”
    Red stained the sheriff’s cheekbones. “Modesty Breck was a runaway bride.”
    “She never married,” Jill said. “As far as I know, she never even agreed to an engagement.”
    “She led on several good men, making them believe she would marry them.”
    Jill held her tongue. If legend and gossip were true, Purcell’s father had been one of those eager men. But in the end, Modesty had never found a man she couldn’t live without.
    Neither had Jill.
    “Modesty’s sister Justine was no better than a prostitute and an adulteress,” Purcell said grimly. “Justine