The Unkindness of Ravens by M. Hilliard (fastest ebook reader txt) 📕

but she’s okay. But she wasn’t okay. I had to acknowledge what the primitive part of my brain had known instantly.

Joanna was dead.

I knew I should check for a pulse, or breathing. Something. Anything. Just to be sure.

I reached down, knowing what I would find.

White fingers, red-tipped, reaching out, hesitating, and then contact. So very still, and cool.

Cold. There was nothing where Joanna’s pulse should be but a bone-chilling cold. I snatched my hand back so quickly I lost my balance. I grabbed the door to keep from falling backward, pulling it and the body, toward me. Then I saw the blood.

I scrambled away, putting as much space between me and Joanna as I could. I landed against the windowsill and stared at the ceiling, trying to think straight.

I needed to tell someone. Call an ambulance. The police.

This could not be happening. Not again.

I didn’t kill the guy. I swear it. He was alive when I left him.

My husband’s death was case closed, as far as the police were concerned. But here I was, with another body, my thoughts whirling and scattering.

I had to do something.

“Cell phone,” I said out loud. My cell phone was in my lunch tote, right where I had dropped it.

Next to the body.

I could do this. I pushed off from the window, focusing on the lipstick red of my bag. I grabbed it and scuttled back to the sill. I pulled out my phone and paused.

If I dialed 911, there would be sirens and flashing lights around the building in no time. In any emergency, we were to clear the library immediately. I looked out the window at the parking lot. We had a good crowd. I might be able to buy some time to pull myself together before I had to talk to the police.

I dialed the library’s main number, turning my back on the ugly tableau in the stairwell.

“Raven Hill Village Library—Circulation. How may I help you?”

Mary Alice. Thank God. The woman could think on her feet and was unflappable.

“Mary Alice, it’s me, Greer. I have—um …” A dead body at my feet. “I have a situation, and I need you to send Helene up. I’m okay, but she needs to hurry. Third floor. Attic stairs. And keep everyone else away.”

There was a brief pause, and then, “Okay, honey, I’ll send her.”

I leaned my head against the cool glass of the window and waited. It wasn’t long before I heard the sound of hurried footsteps. As I turned, Helene Montague, Library Director, stepped into the dim room.

“Greer, what—?” she said, and stopped as she looked past me.

“Joanna Goodhue. Dead.”

Saying it out loud made it horribly real. I turned. The surreal, nightmare quality of the scene dissolved and I saw only Joanna, impossibly still and silent. I gulped for air and put my hand over my mouth. Helene looked at me and without a word reached past me and unlocked the window. Pushing it up, she spun me back toward it.

“Breathe through your mouth,” she said.

I stood inhaling the fresh spring air. I could hear Helene moving behind me. Then she used her own phone to call Mary Alice, giving instructions to close the library. After that she called the police.

“Greer.” Helene was back at my side. “I need to check the attic entrance in the archives and then help Mary Alice secure the building. I want to make sure no one comes up. Can you stay here and wait for the police? Will you be all right?”

“I’ll be all right enough. We don’t have a lot of options. I’ll wait right here.”

She gave me one last searching look, then disappeared back into the darkness of the stairwell. I closed my eyes and tried the measured breathing I’d learned in a long-ago yoga class.

No good. The scene on the landing seemed burned onto my eyelids. The sight of my husband’s lifeless body kept swimming up out of the dark pool of memory, superimposing itself over Joanna’s. Blonde, brunette. Blue eyes, brown. But Danny’s wounds seemed somehow worse. Vicious.

Maybe that was it. Danny had been murdered. His death had looked violent. The scene around him had spoken of rage. I could be overreacting now, seeing more than was there because I somehow expected to see it. Joanna could have fallen, hit her head, and broken her neck. The door was stuck. Could the impact have killed her? Possible, but something niggled. Something was off.

Whatever it was, I wasn’t going to figure it out standing here with my eyes closed. In my previous, corporate life, I’d been known for my cool, analytical thinking. Now I was behaving like the heroine in a Victorian novel having a fit of the vapors. Time to put on my big girl panties and deal. I hadn’t spent my entire life reading mysteries for nothing.

I turned around and moved toward the stairway, stopping near the body. Trying to remain dispassionate, I studied Joanna. Greer Hogan, girl detective, on the job. Joanna was lying half on the landing, half on the floor of the old box room between the two stairways. Her legs were still on the stairs, her head on the floor at my feet. Clotted blood matted her carefully highlighted blonde hair. There was a dark smudge on her bright blue Raven Hill hoodie, and another where her head must have rested against the door. I followed the line of her body up into the dim stairwell.

On the best of days, the old servants’ stairs were not well lit. Each had a single bulb at the top and bottom landings, with a long stretch of darkness in between. At the moment, I had nothing more than the light from the window behind me, and some filtered sunlight from the attic above.

I could see the stair just above Joanna’s feet, and then nothing until the top few steps and the short, spindled railing that separated the stairs from the attic, where a window on the upper landing provided some light. I