Free I Am the Only Running Footman by Martha Grimes

wrong?”
    â€œNo, nothing.” Dolly shook herself and went back to reading her paper. Then she said, “I don’t like the idea of turning this into a bed-and-breakfast. It’s so —”
    â€œLower class?” Kate felt the anger dissipate. She turned back to the cooker. “It gives me something to do.”
    â€œAnd what do you know about the people you take in?”
    â€œNot much. But I don’t take many, you know.”
    Her sister arranged the lime-green nightdress in folds over her good legs, and the shift in posture accentuated the play of light across her breasts. It was all unconscious, Kate knew.The way she now held a match straight up to the tip of a fresh cigarette, the way she lowered her lashes, smoothed her hand over her pale gold hair. Then she rose and stretched, saying she thought she’d go up and have a bath and wash her hair.
    As the slippers tapped down the hall, Kate sat down with her coffee and pulled the newspaper around, looking it over. Another drop in the economy, a shocking rise in rape cases, a child abused, a minister disrupting a cabinet meeting, a murder in Mayfair. Nothing ever changed much.

9
    T HE sign of the Mortal Man made the dusk hideous with its creak and clangor, swinging precariously above the road that wound about the village green. The gentleman pictured on the trembling sign was appropriately depicted, his gouged eyes seeming to reflect not so much on his own mortality as that of the sign. It was an old gallows sign, the sort that was made illegal over a century ago because of the traffic hazard. Probably no traffic hazarded the narrow lane crossed by the beam on which it swung.
    From the outside, the Mortal Man wore much of the look of the country inn — black-and-white Tudor timbering and thatched roof. Inside, one of these beams was in the process of being hammered to splinters by a spindly young man up on a ladder. As Melrose looked left to the lounge and right to the saloon bar, he thought the inn had been caught in the middle of being taken apart or put back together again. Wood paneling leaned against the bar, a gold-framed mirror sprightly with cupids was in sore need of resilvering, a stained-glass window looked recently boarded up.
    The hall was appropriately dark, with its thread of turkey carpet running along to a gloomy staircase. A porcelain leopard appeared to be guarding the dining room to his left. To his right a half-moon-shaped desk was attended by a burly man who was arguing with an unseen opponent, and through the archway to Melrose’s left, the inn’s personnel came and went — a maid with saucy curls demanding her wages of the gentleman behind the counter, who turned her back with vituperative rhetoric; a woman with a saucepan; a boy with a notebook followed by a muddy, hybrid hound; a thin girl with a mop and a slack look both in face and dress.
    The dog welcomed the new guest by grabbing his trouser cuff and hanging on for dear life until the owner rousted him with a kick. Nathan Warboys (for so he had introduced himself) then stood with his arms splayed over the counter under a sign reading Reception , with the intention of giving Melrose a hearty one by letting him in on the family secrets.
    â€œAnd my Sally. It’s a treat, it really is, and ’er comin’ in night after night lookin’ like the leavin’s of a dogfight. Thought that’un ’ud stay on the shelf, I did, but no, she’s got t’be gettin’ up t’mischief just like the other. ‘Ang about, ‘ang about, now. Got to sign this, it’s the law, mate.” Whereupon he thwacked a card down for Melrose to fill in, and hit the bell with such force it sprang from the counter. This was by way of summoning the young lad with the terrier panting with the expectation of another go at the ankle. During their trudge up the narrow staircase, whose creaks and crepitations echoed the sign outside, the