One Bad Apple: An Orchard Mystery by Sheila Connolly

Author:Sheila Connolly [Connolly, Sheila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Detective, Mystery & Detective - Women Sleuths, Crime & mystery, Mystery & Detective, Fiction - Mystery, Fiction, Mystery And Suspense Fiction, Suspense, Women Sleuths
ISBN: 9780425223048
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2009-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

17

Sunday Meg woke early and remained huddled under her multiple blankets, taking inventory. She could hear the balky furnace rumble to life, and after a few moments a feeble puff of warm air drifted from the heating grate. If she strained her ears, she could just hear the ticking of the clock. The sound of it warmed her.

There was so much she had to do, and yet she didn’t want to move, so she lay still, running through the events of the day before. The detective had as much as said that she was a murder suspect; that meant he thought she was capable of killing a man. She didn’t know whether to feel flattered or horrified.

Seth was also near the top of the detective’s short list, but she couldn’t reconcile the cheerful, friendly, helpful man she knew with the idea of a cold-blooded killer who stuffed his victim into a septic tank. Although, she had to admit, there would be a certain poetic justice to it, if plumber Seth were the killer. Which he was not.

Why not, Meg? You barely know him. Why have you decided he isn’t a killer? Because you want him to be one of the good guys?

Because you like him? Or something more? Uh-oh.

Meg lay still and shut her eyes again. This was not what she wanted to think. Okay, so she had finally purged Chandler and his rejection from her system, which was fine until he ended up dead on her property. But she wasn’t looking for another relationship, and certainly not here and now, when she would be leaving in a few months. And Seth was too nice a guy to use for a brief fling. It wouldn’t be fair to him. If he was interested at all, and she had no reason to believe that. He’d been kind to her, but from what she’d seen, he was kind to everyone. Maybe he just pitied her: poor, clueless Meg, stuck in the drafty old house with no friends. Let’s try to cheer her up.

Meg, you’ve really made a mess of things, haven’t you? She had jumped into this whole improvement project with little thought and less research. If she had been thinking, she would have known that she didn’t have the manual skills or expertise to do what needed to be done. She wasn’t even sure she could have told someone else to do it and then overseen the project, and she probably would have been exploited in every way possible. Maybe she was depressed—beaten down by the recent blows in her life. So she had simply seized on the opportunity to flee? That didn’t sit well with her vision of herself as a competent, intelligent woman. Of course, the converse would be that she had assumed that she could handle anything she set her mind to, including carpentry, wiring, and wallpapering. That thought made her laugh—surely she wasn’t that deluded? Probably the truth lay somewhere in between.

The numbers still scared her. It

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