Pouncing on Murder Read Online Free Page A

season, and for the next couple of weeks I’d be spending my spare hours in that cavernous space, dusting and washing and scouring.
    “Speaking of boarders,” Aunt Frances said, taking the top boxes off my pile, “this might be the last year I take in any.”
    I stopped. “What? Why?”
    “Because I’m sixty-two years old,” she said dryly.
    “Sure, but you’re a young sixty-two,” I protested. “And you’ve never said anything about it being too much work before.”
    Although, since I was living on the houseboat, how would I know if it was too much for her? I never saw her clean and the only meal I ever stopped by to eat was the occasional Saturday breakfast. This was a meal cooked by one of the six boarders, which, in addition to often being entertaining, was also a critical part of the boarding agreement.
    “There’s no better way to discover a person’s true character,” Aunt Frances always said, “than to see how he behaves in a kitchen emergency.” And, since my aunt had secretly match-made her boarders into happy couples for decades, I had to agree with her methods.
    Now Aunt Frances rearranged her hold on the empty box. “I make enough money from teaching during the school year,” she said. “I don’t have to take in boarders if I don’t want to. And there are so many things I don’t have time to do in the summer. I can’t remember the last time I went to Mackinac Island, let alone Pictured Rocks.”
    Oh-ho! I grinned, then wiped it from my face before my aunt could see. This was an Otto-induced change, I was certain. And while it might be the end of an era—children who were products of some of my aunt’s earliest matches were traveling north with their own children—it was always better to leave a party while it was hopping.
    “Well,” I said, “I hope you’re not thinking I’m going to take on your boarders.”
    My aunt snorted. “With your cooking skills? They’d make their regrets and abandon you within a week.”
    “Really?” I frowned. “You think they’d last that long?”
    “Only if you get two different kinds of cold cereal.”
    She dropped the box on my bed, gave Eddie a fast pet, and scampered out before I could find a rubber band to shoot at her.
    •   •   •
    I stopped by the marina the next day after work to make sure Chris would have my houseboat set up for me to start cleaning that weekend.
    “Hey, Mini Cooper,” he said lazily. “What’s new with you?”
    Since his uncle Chip, the marina’s owner, was almost seventy, Chris was probably somewhere in his forties, but if you went by his speech patterns, you’d think he was twenty. And though the marina was always spick-and-span and shipshape, I rarely saw Chris lifting anything heavier than a twelve-ounce can of beer.
    My best friend, Kristen, was sure that he hired elves to do the real work, and I was starting to think she wasright. Another of my good friends, Rafe Niswander, said Chris was one of the last of a dying breed of Up North men and that we should encourage him in all ways. Of course, Rafe and Chris were also friends, so I had a good idea of what kind of encouragement he meant—the kind that came in a six-pack.
    How Rafe and Chris had become friends, I really didn’t know. They had to be a decade apart in age, and in spite of Rafe’s summery, laid-back attitude, he had a top-notch work ethic and was the best middle school principal Chilson had seen in years. When Rafe wasn’t being the principal and wasn’t wasting his time lounging in the marina’s office, he was renovating a mess of a house that was next door to the marina. He was also taking his own sweet time about it. He kept saying he wanted it to be perfect and ignored me when I kept telling him that perfection was an unattainable goal.
    “Hey yourself, Chris,” I said. “My aunt was making fun of my cooking skills, can you believe it?”
    He grinned. “Sure can. Good thing you’re not running the boardinghouse,