Free The Luck Runs Out by Charlotte MacLeod

said she never minded being alone, she could always find something to do. Lot of work to an old place like this. I’ll sure never be able to keep it up the way she did, unless I can find me a wife. Don’t know any pretty ladies that like to cook and clean house and wouldn’t mind settlin’ down with a lonesome blacksmith, by any chance?”
    “You never can tell,” said Shandy. The buggy whip heiress flashed into his mind. Flackley impressed him as a decent sort. But that would still leave Tim with Lorene McSpee. If it was cleaning Flackley wanted, perhaps he’d do better with the demon housekeeper. It would be awful to have that woman slopping bleach water over Miss Flackley’s domain, though. Shandy, like the nephew, was feeling a deepening sense of loss. It was a damned shame that so useful a life could so wantonly have been snuffed out, that so self-respecting a human being could have been handled at the end with so little regard for the dignity she’d always maintained.
    Corbin had made a good point there, about not knowing whether or not she’d been killed in the place where she was found. Being at her home, seeing how meticulously she’d kept everything up, he found it less and less possible to believe she’d driven the van up to the animal husbandry area of her own free will. To visit the barns at a totally unaccustomed hour, wearing an evening dress and a mohair stole, would have been totally out of character for her. Ergo, she probably didn’t.
    Unless Stott was lying. Miss Flackley had, after all, been a woman, and a surprisingly charming one when she’d shed her working clothes and professional manner. Stott was by no means an unattractive man. Helen and Iduna had both gone on at some length about that very subject last night when they were straightening up after the party.
    Stott was distinguished in his field, stately in presence, well lined in pocket. He had shown himself to the lonely farrier as a man susceptible to her femininity as well as respectful of her professional acumen. If by any remote chance he had asked Miss Flackley to hie with him to the pigpens to contemplate Belinda by moonlight would she have said him nay? Wouldn’t she, figuratively speaking, have thrown her mohair stole over the windmill and gone?
    Stott had said he’d left Miss Flackley at the parking lot and walked home alone, but had he? Was it remotely possible the man could have deceived them all? Shandy thought back to the dinner party. Stott had been the success of the evening, no question about that, stuffing himself with Helen’s good food, basking in the admiration of the other ladies, acting almost frolicsome, for him. He’d never appeared more open, more genial, more likable. Shandy found it simply incredible that Stott could have been plotting the whole time to murder Miss Flackley, stuff her into the mash feeder, and kidnap his own sow with the farrier’s van. Yet when other possibilities were eliminated, the insane became the probable.
    The hell with that. Other possibilities had not been eliminated. There must be scads of them kicking around. It was only a matter of finding out what they were. Corbin seemed an intelligent man; he wouldn’t be taken in by the falsely obvious. Would he?

Chapter 6
    S HANDY HAD NOT OVERESTIMATED the state policeman’s intelligence. As Lieutenant Corbin seemed on the point of departing, he paused and remarked ever so casually, “Mind if we take a quick look around the house, Flackley? I didn’t bring a search warrant with me, so you can refuse if you want.”
    The former rodeo hand shrugged. “Guess that wouldn’t keep you out for long, would it? Sure, walk right in and make yourselves to home.”
    “Just a second. I might as well see if there’s any word on the van.”
    Corbin went back to his cruiser and picked up the radio transmitter. “Have Madigan bring a radio car to the Flackley house at Forgery Point.”
    He gave marvelously accurate instructions. “No,