Spirit of Seduction by Olivia Quincy

Author:Olivia Quincy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

When she left Lorraine’s, she felt better. There was a brighter cast to her state of mind, and she no longer thought that being alone in her house would make her feel uneasy. In fact, her mind turned to the blueberry bushes she wanted to finish working on, and the pathetically sparse tufts of sea grass around the back deck. Her landscape needed her, and she turned toward home.

She passed the general store and saw the three old guys in their usual chairs, but she wasn’t in the mood for them and she waved and walked on.

They, apparently, were in the mood for her.

“Did you ask your ghost what happened?” called one of them as she was walking away.

She stopped and turned around. Did she want to tell them about Robert? The story he’d told her wasn’t one she was inclined to share. It felt intimate, personal. She thought it was between the two of them.

But those three old guys might be the only ones in town who knew what really happened. They’d certainly know more about it than anyone else she knew. If she didn’t talk to them, she’d have only Robert’s version of the story.

She walked back toward them.

“I did, as a matter of fact.”

“And?”

“I think he loved Molly Nickerson, and I don’t think anybody killed anybody.” She had a sense that she had wronged Robert when she doubted him about Nickerson, and she wanted to make it up to him by defending him to the rocking-chair trio.

Harry laughed in a vaguely sinister way. “Oh, my dear, lots of people killed lots of people.”

“If he killed her, why wasn’t he arrested?” She was staunch.

“It wasn’t the kind of killing the law had anything to say about.” Harry’s tone turned sober.

Zoe was about to say that it was real killings the law had something to say about, and these folklore killings didn’t seem to fall into that category, but she stopped herself. There were injustices of all kinds that the law had nothing to say about.

“And just what kind of a killing was it?” she asked. Her tone was flip, but she really wanted to know.

“It was the heartbreaking kind,” said Harry. “And that’s the worst kind there is.”

“But he loved her,” she protested.

“Whether he did or whether he didn’t, he broke that girl’s heart.” All three men nodded.

“And you don’t think her death was an accident?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t. We’ll never know exactly what forces were at work pushing her under that train, but I can tell you for certain that it wasn’t an accident. She jumped, or she was pushed, but she didn’t just stumble into an oncoming train. And whether she jumped or she was pushed, he’s equally guilty. I’m telling you, he broke that girl’s heart.”

Zoe saw that, whatever the facts, the three old men were as sure as it was possible for men to be. She suspected there wasn’t much more they could tell her.

“Whatever happened, it was a sad story,” she said. Then she bade them good-bye and headed for her car.

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