Free The Five Bells and Bladebone by Martha Grimes

stone. Simon and yours truly. What a coup. It would fire the imagination of an hallucinating terrorist turf accountant, or whoever the idiot is in his book.”
    Jury checked his watch and rose. “I’m on my way to Watermeadows; ring there if MacAllister turns the thumbscrews.”

Nine

    I TS SILENCE , its absence of life in the midst of what had been splendor were the things that struck Jury first about Watermeadows.
    The gardens covered acres and encompassed pools, reflecting ponds, statues now crumbling and patchy with moss all surrounding a baroque house. In the front was a formal pond from whose centerpiece of marble children and dolphins Jury imagined water must have gushed up and outward, falling round an elaborately carved basin in a curtain translucent and shimmering in the May light of another year. No water gushed from it now. And on the sloping hill behind the large house were terraced gardens. Thus in the midst of what was otherwise a splendid English arrangement of yew and box hedges, beds of grape hyacinths, long borders of aubrietas and wallflowers, there had been at one time an attempt to bring to the English formality something of the Italian, water springing up from hidden reservoirs and cascading down the hillside.
    Around the drive were yew trees; beyond them, paths winding through herbaceous borders, row after row of pink and mauve and blue, beds and carpets of flowers, bushes, sumach shrubs, low and high walls, and whatlooked like an ancient cupola, some sixteenth-century ruin, nearly overgrown with moss. Out there in the distance, beyond a screen of beech trees, he glimpsed silvery water and the roof of a small building that might have been the Watermeadows summerhouse.
    Watermeadows was a splendid rotting beauty, but Jury saw no one about to enjoy its splendor.
     • • • 
    The servant who opened the door was a frail old form who fit the grand design of the estate. This was Crick (he told Jury), older than Plant’s butler Ruthven, thinner and dustier, as if he, together with the broken marble figure in the foyer, a faded painting of Malvern, and a worn Antwerp carpet, needed a good touching up.
    He asked Jury if he would be so kind as to wait, that he would tell Lady Summerston that he was here.
    When Jury said that it was Mrs. Lean that he had come to see, Crick simply replied that Mrs. Lean was resting — after all, it had been a dreadful shock — and it was Lady Summerston that he would see first in the circumstances.
    That the butler, in his old-world and excessively polite way, took it upon himself to decide what circumstances best fit whom, so amused Jury that he simply did as he was bid — waited in a large room off the rotunda-like entry-room.
     • • • 
    The room was huge, shadowy, high-ceilinged, and nearly empty of furniture. At the far end was a Regency sofa whose gilt was peeling, flanked by armchairs in worn tapestry. They sat near a fireplace with a green and black marble surround. The floor was inlaid, the doorframes marble, the mirrors enormous. A massive crystal chandelier hung from a frescoed ceiling and there were in each corner Doric columns of the same green and black marble, as if the size of the room needed this extra support. Long windows behind the sparse furnishings, uncurtained, over-lookeda terrace that served almost as a stage for the sweep of the gardens. Beyond the terrace were also formal pools, but these were now only drained concrete. To the side of each was a statue of a partially clothed maiden, one with a garland, one with a bouquet, both with their skirts slightly raised, toes pointing forward, as if they’d meant to dip them in the pool, marble harbingers of spring.
    He turned from the light and looked into the crypt-like darkness of the room. Soothing to the eye, depressing to the spirit. It reminded him of those palatial rooms he used to see in old war films, apartments from which the wealthy had fled, taking what possessions they could,