Free The Murder Stone by Louise Penny

sipped gin and tonics in the blinding sun. None wore sun hats, preferring sunstroke and skin cancer to spectacle. Peter stood talking to his mother, his hand to his brow to block out the sun, as though in a permanent salute.
    Thomas looked regal and elegant while Sandra looked alert. Her eyes darted here and there, assessing portions, watching the weaving waiters, monitoring who got what when and how it compared to hers.
    On the other side of the terrasse, also in the shade, Clara could just see Bert Finney. He seemed to be watching his wife, though it was hard to tell. She looked away just as his pilgrim eye caught hers.
    Sipping her cool drink she grabbed a handful of thick hair, wet with perspiration, and peeled it off her neck. Then she flapped it up and down, to air out the area. Only then did she notice Peter’s mother watching, her faded pink and white face crinkled and lovely, her Wedgwood eyes thoughtful and kind. A beautiful English rose inviting you to approach, to bend closer. Too late you’d realize there was a wasp buried deep, waiting to do what wasps do best.
    Less than twenty-four hours, she said to herself. We can leave after breakfast tomorrow.
    A deerfly buzzed around her sweating head and Clara waved her arms so wildly she knocked the rest of her sandwich off the stone wall and into the perennial bed below. The answer to an ant’s prayers, except the ones it fell on.
    ‘Claire hasn’t changed,’ said Peter’s mother.
    ‘Neither have you, Mother.’
    Peter tried to keep his voice as civil as hers, and felt he’d achieved that perfect balance of courtesy and contempt. So subtle it was impossible to challenge, so obvious it was impossible to miss.
    Across the scorching terrasse Julia felt her feet begin to burn in their thin sandals on the hot stones.
    ‘Hello, Peter.’ She closed her mind to her smouldering feet and crossed the terrasse, air-kissing her younger brother. ‘You’re looking good.’
    ‘So’re you.’
    Pause.
    ‘Nice weather,’ he said.
    Julia searched her rapidly emptying brain for something smart to say, something witty and intelligent. Something to prove she was happy. That her life wasn’t the shambles she knew he thought it was. Silently she repeated to herself, Peter’s perpetually purple pimple popped. It helped.
    ‘How’s David?’ Peter asked.
    ‘Oh, you know him,’ said Julia lightly. ‘He adjusts to anything.’
    ‘Even prison? And here you are.’
    She searched his placid handsome face. Was that an insult? She’d been away from the family so long she was out of practice. She felt like a long retired parachutist suddenly tossed out of a plane.
    Four days ago, when she’d arrived, she’d been hurt and exhausted. The last smile, the last empty compliment, the last courtesy wrung from her in the disaster that had been the last year, during David’s trial. Feeling betrayed, humiliated and exposed, she’d come back home to heal. To this cosy mother and the tall, handsome brothers of her magical, mystical memory. Surely they’d take care of her.
    Somehow she’d forgotten why she’d left them in the first place. But now she was back and was remembering.
    ‘Imagine,’ said Thomas, ‘your husband stealing all that money, and you not knowing. It must have been horrible.’
    ‘Thomas,’ said his mother, shaking her head slightly. Not in rebuke for the insult to Julia but for saying it in front of the staff. Julia felt the hot stones sizzling beneath her feet. But she smiled and held her ground.
    ‘Your father,’ Mrs Finney began, then stopped.
    ‘Go on, Mother,’ said Julia, feeling something old and familiar swish its tail deep inside her. Something decades dormant was stirring. ‘My father?’
    ‘Well, you know how he felt.’
    ‘How did he feel?’
    ‘Really, Julia, this is an inappropriate conversation.’ Her mother turned her pink face to her. It was said with the tender smile, the slight flutter of those hands. How long had it been since