Throat by Peter Straub

Author:Peter Straub [Straub, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780451179180
Publisher: Signet
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

PART EIGHT

COLONEL BEAUFORT RUNNEL

1

I let myself into the house and called out a greeting. The answering silence suggested that the Ransoms were all napping. For a moment I felt like Goldilocks.

In the kitchen I found the yellow flap of a Post-It note on the central counter beside a bottle of Worcestershire sauce and three glasses smeary with red fluid. Tim—Where are you? We're going to a movie, be back around 7 or 8. Monroe and Wheeler dropped in, see evidence upstairs. John.

I dropped the note into the garbage and went upstairs. Marjorie had arranged little pots and bottles of cosmetics on the guest room table. A copy of the AARP magazine lay splayed open on the unmade bed.

Nothing had been disturbed in John's bedroom, except by John. He had stashed his three-hundred-dollar vodka on the bedside table, no doubt to keep Ralph from sampling it. Shirts and boxer shorts lay in balls and tangles on the floor. Byron Dorian's two big paintings, powerful reminders of April's death, had been taken down and turned to the wall.

On the third floor, Damrosch's satchel still lay underneath the couch.

I crossed the hall into April's office. A pile of corporate reports had been squared away, and old faxes lay stacked on the shelves. I finally noticed that most of the white shelves were bare.

Monroe and Wheeler had packed up most of April's files and papers and taken them away. By nightfall, an Armory Place accountant would be examining her records, looking for a motive for her murder. Monroe and Wheeler had probably emptied her office at Barnett that morning. I pulled open a desk drawer and found two loose paper clips, a tube of Nivea skin cream, and a rubber band. I was a couple of hours too late to discover what April had learned about William Damrosch.

I went back to John's office and picked up Colonel Runnel's book. Then I stretched out on the couch to read until the Ransoms came back from the movies.

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