Read Unhinged for Free Online Page A

called, really wanting to go inside now; the aspirin Ellie had given me earlier was wearing off big-time. “Was there something else you wanted? I mean, that you came for in the first place?”
    Probably by now the whole town knew Jake Tiptree had fallen off another ladder. But I hardly thought Lian Ash would hotfoot it over here just on account of that.
    “Nope,” he replied. “Lookin’ over the job. Need to talk about all o’ this work. Costs, materials. Make some decisions.”
    He got into the truck, a beat-up little vehicle with Bondo patches, mismatched tires, and a new heavy-duty bedliner that was probably holding the whole thing together.
    “But we can hash that over later,” he added. “After that, we start taking the old cellar wall apart an’ bracin’ ’er up.”
    I could have used some of the braces he’d be using, big cast-iron ones built to take the weight of houses. I gripped the porch rail as he slammed his truck door and backed out of the yard.
    “Come with me,” Ellie said firmly, taking my arm in a gentle grip that nevertheless managed to imply how much force might be exerted if I were foolish enough to resist. For this reason, and because the world had again begun spinning gently as if the rotation of the earth were being demonstrated especially for me, I followed Ellie meekly into the parlor and sank into the only piece of furniture not currently occupied by a household animal.
    “Wuff,”
said Monday, thumping her black Labrador tail at me from her place on the sofa.
    “Mmmph,”
uttered Prill, wagging her short, stubby one as she settled herself more comfortably in the easy chair.
    “Meeowrowyowowl,”
Cat Dancing commented from the recliner, observing through crossed blue eyes the sad fact that I was still not dead.
    Kicking my shoes off, I lay down carefully on the settee and pulled up the comforter Ellie had crocheted for me the previous Christmas. And while she brought aspirin and ginger ale to take it with, and Sam and Wade returned, working together at hauling the downspouts bumpingly up the ladder, I picked up the latest issue of the Eastern Maine
Examiner
.
    Besides ads for truck parts and all-terrain vehicles and notices of births, weddings, and funerals, it printed news from all over the county, not skipping the juicy stuff. Bar fights, bad checks, boundary disputes, and arrests due to the possession of illegal substances were grist for the
Examiner
’s mill, along with house fires, vandalism, and the locally popular car-versus-moose encounters, with photos if the moose won.
    This week’s riveting lead story had to do with a young man caught trying to evade the Canadian border patrol with a bag of illicit pharmaceuticals. But soon I drifted into a half-sleep watched over by the animals. Ellie delivered a cold cloth for my head; she’d have brought me a beefsteak, too, but I vetoed that.
    I already had the smell of blood in my nose: Harriet’s. Someone had gotten rid of the body but made a mistake, I mused drowsily, by losing her boot in that compost heap.
    Around me the parlor’s old gold-medallion wallpaper glowed dully, the sunshine through the antique, wavery-glassed windows slanting slowly to late afternoon. Then I did sleep, not waking until Ellie asked in the gloom of dusk if I felt like getting up for dinner or wanted it in my room.
    Dinner upstairs while the company laughs below isn’t as bad as being sent to bed with nothing at all, I feel, but it’s close. Voices were already mingling in the dining room as I struggled upstairs to change clothes and wash my face before hobbling down again.
    And all this—my tumble from the ladder, Victor’s clinic, the explosion, Harry Markle, the binoculars, the guests, and my growing certainty that Harriet Hollingsworth had been murdered—
    —was why it never occurred to me to wonder how Mr. Ash knew I disliked heights.
     
     
    An old wooden house on an island in Maine needs about as much regular scraping and painting as