A Match Made for Murder Iona Whishaw (pride and prejudice read .TXT) 📖

from the view and looked down the hall toward where her family slept. There was no getting around it: she was dying.

She wondered now if she’d been right not to tell him. It might have been less lonely. But then he would have had a whole year of anxiety and misery, said a practical voice in her head. It was better this way. In fact, if only she could manage to go away and die on her own, everyone could be spared. As it was, she didn’t really know how it would come. She had known all along. She knew the doctor would want to tell her husband and not her, but she demanded to know and swore him to secrecy. She couldn’t bear the thought of her husband having to cope with her death.

The doctor had told her she would become weak and that would be the time to go into the hospital. They could make her comfortable there, ease her passing. The doctor had disapproved in the strongest terms of her decision not to tell her husband. He’d said he had half a mind to break his promise and do it himself.

At least put your affairs in order, he’d said. Jane looked around the small kitchen and through into the sitting room, where light was beginning to colour the walls. She had so few affairs to put in order. The biggest affairs were her husband and Tina, and they were in order. Tina seemed, though Jane could not for a minute understand it, to enjoy working on cars alongside her father. That would be especially good when she had gone. They had a bond. They could support each other.

The one affair to put in order, she thought, was telling him what had happened to Tina. She wouldn’t ask permission to break her promise. Someone on this earth needed to know in case, one day, Tina wasn’t as okay as she so defiantly claimed to be.

Ames was spending dawn at the beach, a quiet place with only the whispering lap of water to accompany his confusion. He sometimes came here to think after a sleepless night, and he usually had sleepless nights over some rocky problem with a girl. He picked up a handful of sand that wasn’t covered with a patch of freezing snow from the late-night fall and tossed it into the still water along the edge, watching the wavelets moving out in a circle. Elephant Mountain, across the narrow band of water, was just beginning to light up. Topmost in his mind was that nothing could ever again be on the same footing with Tina Van Eyck. He thought of the day it had all started when he’d gone out to the garage on a flimsy pretext in the hopes of getting her to go out with him again. She’d rebuffed him completely, but then had laughed, made a joke, as if it still might be possible.

Now nothing was possible. The dress-shop keeper had looked at the photo and said, “Nope, not her. This woman had a thinner face.” His own anxieties had been relieved by this proof that she had been telling the truth, but he had delivered a deathblow to any regard she might have for him. Had he done the right thing? Yes, he thought, he had. But had he done it the right way? He didn’t think so. He’d failed absolutely to maintain the polite distance Darling seemed to manage so effortlessly.

Darling had arrested Miss Winslow on the suspicion of murder when they’d first met but had been so professional that a year and a half later they were actually married. Would he ever be like Darling? He’d been angry and afraid. Why? He’d felt betrayed, as if Tina had lied to him about who she was, and his resentment came out in every word he’d said to her and every look he’d given her. There would be no coming back from that. He stood in front of the lake now, pulling his overcoat tightly around himself, his heart wrestling with the conflicting feelings of uplift at the beauty of the morning and confusion about why it mattered so much to him that Tina would never speak to him again.

“Poor man,” Lane said. “He’s really in shock.” They were the only people on the outside patio. The other guests were breakfasting inside because of the lingering chill in the morning air.

“Why would he keep that amount of money on him? Eight hundred dollars will get her quite far,” Darling said.

Lane pulled her cardigan around her. “Brrr. I feel like we are putting on a brave Canadian face. It’s not that warm out here.”

“Buck up! The sun will start doing its job in no time. Look, I think you ought to tell Holden what you know.”

“It’s going to sound as if we’ve been spying on her the whole time, but of course, you’re right. It’s not fair to leave him ignorant of his wife’s activities.”

“And you haven’t been spying?”

They found Holden’s suite door open, and Lane knocked gently on it.

“Mr. Holden?”

Holden came to the door with a folded shirt in his hand. “Just packing up. Might as well head back to Phoenix.” He motioned them in. Two large leather suitcases were open on the bed. He tossed the shirt into one of them and then put his hands in his pockets and looked listlessly around the room. Even in his grief, he looked dapper, with a pressed white Egyptian cotton shirt and a dark blue silk scarf carefully tied at the neck.

“I just have to admit I’ve been had. My friends warned me, but I wouldn’t hear a word said against her. My fault. What I don’t understand is why she took off. She knew I was fond of her, and I would have supported her and left her nicely set up for that matter. I’m an old man. I don’t pretend she really loved me,