Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 138642 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 693(@200wpm)___ 555(@250wpm)___ 462(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138642 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 693(@200wpm)___ 555(@250wpm)___ 462(@300wpm)
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
ONE LIFE (GRANT)
Well, damn.
That’s definitely a dead body.
I tilt my head back, looking up at the pair of heeled loafers twisting slowly over the grand ballroom of the Arrendell mansion.
We’re standing on the upper walkway looking down over the massive checkered floor. I’m so far away that the dead woman still looks tiny, dangling from the central chandelier.
Her own weight makes the whole thing sway gently with a morbid chiming of glimmering ornaments.
I cock my head to the left and right, frowning up at the body.
Next to me, Junior Sergeant Micah Ainsley huffs, cocking his head to the right, his pale-blue eyes pensive.
“Don’t know how else to call it, Captain Faircross,” he says. “It’s a textbook suicide. Pretty clear-cut.”
I grunt in numb agreement.
Not much way it can be anything else, of course, but I can’t help scrutinizing the scene anyway, considering where we are.
Call it a cop’s overdeveloped instincts for detail, but I need to be sure, dammit.
Because right now, looking at this woman dangling some fifty feet off the ground, hanging there by a trailing velvet red curtain drawn into a noose, I’m not fucking feeling it.
Oh, I am feeling lots of other things.
I don’t know.
Maybe it’s because it happened in this house, but even if it hadn’t, I’d still get a damned funny feeling about this whole mess.
The woman looks like she was in her late forties or early fifties, her dark-brown hair just starting to grey. She’s short, a little thick. Her body hangs slack inside the severe plain blue-and-white pinstriped uniform dress that’s typical for the mansion staff.
The women gathered below, nearly breaking their necks as they stare up at the scene, are wearing the same thing.
Same apron. Same thick beige stockings. Same low-heeled leather loafers.
Even the same hairstyle with their hair pulled back into tight, no-nonsense buns.
The deceased has a round, square-set face with deep laugh lines despite the puffiness already starting to set in.
There’s a terrible purple bruise around her neck, just visible past the twist of garishly red velvet.
Despite the plainness of her outfit, her nails are painted a vivid scarlet.
I scan the room again.
The walls all around the grand ballroom are draped with floor-to-ceiling velvet tapestry that sheet past the walkway where I’m standing, evenly spaced at broad intervals. They pour down like runners of blood to the ballroom floor below.
There’s one conspicuously absent on a diagonal from where Micah and I stand, just around the corner of the square walkway.
It’s easy to see what happened.
She stood at the railing of the walkway and pulled the drape loose from its overhead fixtures, then dragged the full length of it up. Must’ve done it in the dead of night—considering it’s about six in the morning right now, and her appearance tells me she’s been dead for three to five hours.
She could’ve tied one end of the drape around the upper walkway railing, then knotted the other end to weight it.
I don’t want to think how many tries it took her to toss the end until it caught just right on the chandelier and let the rest swing back to her.
From that point on, it would’ve been easy.
Undo the knot.
Tie the end into a noose.
Jump.
Leaving her life behind with a damning question.
Why?
According to the Lord and Lady of the house, one of the younger girls on the live-in housekeeping staff woke up early to get started on her chores. She came into the ballroom, saw the woman hanging, and screamed—sending the entire house scrambling to call into town.
To the Redhaven PD, namely.
To me.
“Oh, my, this is dreadful,” Lucia Arrendell hisses at my other side, wringing her thin hands.
Her aristocratic face twists, a caricature of dramatic distress. Even this early in the morning, she’s in a deep wine silk robe with perfect makeup, her white-streaked icy-blonde bob so stiff it barely moves with all her fluttering.
I just stare at her as she sniffs loudly.
“To think, the poor dear was so unhappy that she’d turn to this. God. But we always include mental health coverage as part of our employee insurance policy. I don’t understand, I just wish—”
“Quiet,” I mutter. “I’m trying to think.”
The air goes cold.
Well, colder.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Lucia Arrendell never heard those words in her pampered life. Definitely not from the offended gasp she gives back, but before she can do more than open her red-painted mouth, her husband—standing at her back in a burgundy velvet smoking jacket and black silk pajama pants—silences her with a hand against the small of her back.
“Now, now, dear,” Montero Arrendell drawls in his exaggerated Clark Gable accent. “I know you’re distressed, but do let the detectives focus on their work, yes?”
He meets my eyes over the top of his wife’s head like he’s doing me a big fucking favor.
No matter how conciliatory and smooth he sounds, I see what’s behind those impenetrable green eyes.