Death at the Falls by Rosemary Simpson

Author:Rosemary Simpson [Simpson, Rosemary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

“Did you win big last night?” Crazy Louie asked, tying on his leather apron.

“I didn’t have enough cash to make it worth my while,” Amos said, setting out the drawing of the new barrel he’d been working on.

“Did Flynn go down in the fifteenth round?”

“Like a rock.”

“When Paddy drops a number, you can count on it.” Louie thumbed his nose in the universal gesture of one trickster to another.

“I’ll remember that if there’s a next time.”

“Did he get hurt bad?”

“Swollen nose, black eye, a cut cheek. Maybe a couple of loosened teeth.” It had looked to Amos as though Paddy deliberately walked into some of the wild blows Flynn swung at him, but he thought it best to keep that opinion to himself.

“Fight fans like to see the blood fly,” Louie said. “They need to feel they’ve gotten their money’s worth, or they won’t come back.”

That confirmed what Amos had suspected. The fight was fixed. Paddy had been paid to wait until an agreed-upon round before taking down his challenger. The only question was whether Flynn had been in on it, but Amos couldn’t afford to seem too curious. He’d wait a while before trying to find out.

“I used red oak on the last barrel,” Crazy Louie mused, shrugging off the previous night’s bout. “But I think the white oak staves curve better.” He headed off toward a pile of lumber at the far end of the shop.

“Need some help?” Amos called.

Louie waved his arm and continued walking.

Keeping an eye on Louie, who was setting aside some white oak planks and rejecting others, Amos moved toward the stand-up desk where the shop’s receipt book was kept. He’d seen Louie flick through it more than once, muttering to himself and making notations on some of the columned pages. If he was as obsessed with his mission to shoot the falls as Amos thought him to be, odds were good that Louie was keeping track of every piece of lumber and animal he used to bring him closer to his goal.

Red oak and a Cotswold sheep. Those were the words Amos was searching for as he skimmed the most recent entries. Every few seconds he glanced up to make sure Louie hadn’t left the shadowy depths of the area where the wood was stored to season. He caught a glimpse of the words red oak, but nothing more than a notation about price and delivery. No record of a barrel having been built. The most up-to-date record of animals sent into the whitewater was of a pair of leghorns, one rooster, one hen.

Still keeping an eye on Louie, Amos ran a finger along the ledger’s inner binding, searching for signs that a sheet had been ripped out. Sketches and what looked to be haphazard jottings had been stored between some of the pages, but they didn’t seem to be much more than random ideas never acted upon. He paused at a drawing of a ram’s head, but there was nothing to tell him when the rough picture had been made.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.