Free High Rhymes and Misdemeanors by Diana Killian

lunatic!” Peter broke off, uncharacteristically at a loss for words.
    By now it had sunk in on Grace that if Peter Fox had killed the man in his secret passage he would not have been yelling what was the matter with her. He would not have wasted a minute wrestling with Grace when he had plenty of other weapons within grasp. She was not naive enough to imagine she had actually held her own in physical combat. The fact that even now, following their impromptu brawl, he merely stood there rubbing his cheek and glaring, told Grace all she needed to know about Peter Fox and the dead man in his stockroom.
    “You were hysterical,” he stated.
    Voice wavering, she got out, “I don’t care if I’m foaming at the mouth, no one is ever laying a hand on me again!”
    Peter quit rubbing his cheek and gaped indignantly. “You silly bitch, you’re lucky I don’t wring your neck. Who do you think you are?” He took a menacing step toward Grace. “And what the hell are you doing in my house?”
    All at once Grace felt perfectly calm. Rational. She willed away the vision of how she must appear to him, Mr. Rochester’s crazy wife in her livelier moments, and pronounced, “I came to warn you.”
    “Of what? ” Clearly he thought the warning had to be as bad as whatever she was warning against.
    “It’s a long story. I think you’d better …” Like a figure of doom, Grace pointed toward the back office.
    Peter stared, following the traverse of her finger, then glanced back at Grace. “If this is some kind of joke …”
    Grace shook her head.
    Keeping a wary eye on her, Peter started toward the back room. Grace followed. She saw him pause a fraction of a second when the smell hit him. He muttered something she didn’t catch.
    Flicking on the light, Peter stared around the office with narrowed eyes. Grace hung back in the doorway; he crowded the little room. She gestured toward the shelves with their faux ledgers and glued-on gimcracks.
    “In there.”
    He looked pale. She thought, he already knows what that scent means. Tersely, he asked, “How do you know about the passageway?”
    “It was open when I arrived this afternoon.”
    “Make yourself at home,” he muttered, crouching down before the shelf. Reaching behind, he released some catch and swung the case toward himself as though he were opening a door.
    The passage mouth gaped blackly before them.
    “Well?”
    “He’s in there.” She shivered, hugging herself against the memory of the thing at the foot of the stairs.
    “He?”
    Frowning, Peter reached in, and to Grace’s chagrin, snapped on an overhead light. She could not see his face, but she saw the set of his shoulders go rigid. His whole body was perfectly still for a moment and then he moved toward the stairs and out of Grace’s line of vision.
    Footsteps dragging, Grace entered the stockroom and dropped down at the bare desk. She could not see what was happening in the passage, but Peter’s out-loud thought reached her ears, “You greedy little sod, what have you done?”
    She waited, staring unseeingly at the painting of Dutch windmills. How had she not known that unmistakable smell the first time? The pungent, metallic odor of blood and other. The less definable scent of death.
    A moment later Peter ducked out of the passage. His eyes, meeting Grace’s, looked electric blue in the pallor of his grim face.
    “Would you mind explaining how you figure into this?”
    All the lazy charm of their first encounter was gone. This, Grace thought, was the real man: tough and rather cold.
    “I was hoping you could tell me. Since I pulled you out of that stream I’ve been run off the road, abducted by men with guns, and held prisoner in an abandoned farmhouse. Today I found a dead man in your secret passage.”
    Peter’s eyes flickered. “What were you doing in my secret passage to begin with?”
    “I told you, I came to warn you.”
    “Warn me of what?”
    Grace spluttered, “Of—of that! ” She