Heather [antikvár]

How easily murder is discovered. —Shakespeare Thé house was like a jewel. I possessed it as though it were my own, and not, in fact. Miss Grimes's tiny house with the secret rooui beside the stair. On that autumn night when things began to change, to shift and move about, to take on new shapes, I had been living at 1 Greenwood Place for nearly five months, and I had achieved an odd sort of happiness, a kind of wary belief that life might be good again. That evening I sat reading quietly in the Victorian sitting room, with its burgundy-velvet draperies, its shabby, graceful love seat, half-listening to the rain drumming upon the windowpane. From time to time, I spread my hands to the glowing gas log in the brown-marble fireplace and let the warmth seep into my bones, for it seemed to me that I was always cold, that I had been frozen ever since the night Jed had gone. I heard Louise clicking down the stairs. She came and stood in the sitting-room doorway, a slender girl in a belted white raincoat, with a half-dozen books under one arm; a young woman about my own age, with a short, square face and square white teeth. In repose, her mouth was disciplined, almost prim, but when she talked, quickly and dramatically, her face came to vivid, magnetic life. It did so now, when she spoke the most prosaic of words. "I'm just going to walk up to the branch library with