Free No Way to Kill a Lady by Nancy Martin Page A

dealership that he plunked on a portion of Blackbird Farm that I’d sold to him in a moment of financial desperation. That’s how we’d first met—­with me trying to dig myself out of my tax troubles by selling just a couple of acres of the farm. The endeavors were all passions of his, and he was trying out things that suited his nature. None of them had been particularly successful at first, but they got him interested in business. And once Michael’s interest was engaged, he became tenacious.
    At the time of our meeting, Michael had also still operated in a peripheral part of his father’s business. How the Abruzzo family made their money was a tightly knotted web of crime often covered in the newspapers along with pictures of his father and half brothers in handcuffs and covering their faces with magazines. To his credit, Michael had quietly begun to untangle himself from his family. As for whether he had entirely separated from Abruzzo affairs—­well, his recent guilty plea told the tale.
    All along, Michael had been expanding his legitimate ventures to include a couple of gas station–convenience stores with the unsavory name of Gas N Grub. As the price of gasoline soared, so had his profits. He built a couple more Gas N Grubs, and a few more after that. Wheeling and dealing in gasoline required not just a ruthless streak but the kind of immunity to intimidation that he’d earned in spades while working for his father. He’d made his first million about a year ago.
    â€œHow broke?” I asked. “As broke as me?”
    â€œSweetheart, nobody is as broke as you.” Fondly, he ruffled my hair. “One of my employees seized the moment when I went to jail. He embezzled just about everything I had, including the petty cash at the garage. Then he took off.”
    â€œWhere did he go?”
    Michael smiled. “I’ll work on that, don’t worry. Trouble is, the money could be gone for good—­up his nose, or maybe he blew it at a dog track.”
    â€œYou’ve called the police, right?”
    He shook his head. “The cops aren’t going to be sympathetic to me. I’ll take care of this myself.”
    â€œOh, Michael. I can’t stand it if you—­”
    â€œTake it easy. No knee breaking.”
    â€œPromise?”
    He didn’t promise. Instead, he said, “There’s more. Family stuff. I— We can talk about it later. Thing is, until I figure out what I can get back from the moron, I could start selling off assets to put some cash in my wallet. But that may take a while. Right now, I don’t have enough dough to buy us another jar of peanut butter.”
    But he had enough money to buy a couple of cell phones, I thought to myself. Or perhaps those phones had come from his father? And what “family stuff” was there to talk about that he couldn’t say to me now, in the light of day?
    But so far, our relationship had two unspoken truths.
    First: He would do his best to extricate himself from the Abruzzo family.
    Second: I wouldn’t ask questions concerning how he managed the extricating.
    But sometimes I ached with the uncertainty.
    Today, I said, “I can afford plenty of peanut butter.”
    We got up from the porch steps and strolled out to the pony pasture, hand in hand. Toby scrambled up and followed. Emma’s herd of Shetland ponies rushed over to investigate us, biting one another to get close. They shoved their shaggy heads through the split rails. One particularly nasty black beast tried to muscle his way through the fence.
    â€œThat’s one funny-­looking pony,” Michael said.
    â€œIt’s not a pony. That’s your Christmas dinner.”
    â€œA pig?” Michael looked more closely. “Emma’s into pigs now?”
    â€œNo, someone dropped him off. It happens all the time—­people abandon unwanted pets here, thinking we’re a working