High Rhymes and Misdemeanors Read online

The police were dragging the tarn behind Craddock House when Peter and Grace returned, following their visit to Lady Vee’s.

  “What are they looking for?” Grace asked Peter’s stern profile.

  “What do you think they’re looking for?”

  She had almost forgotten about the poor little murdered man in the secret passage, preoccupied as she was by the promise of a long-lost work by Byron.

  Her eyes met his. “Will they find…it?”

  Peter turned away from the window. “If they look hard enough.”

  After this he opened the shop and conducted business as though nothing more were on his mind than matching the right customer to the right antiquity.

  Grace amused herself thumbing through some old copies of Punch and reading up on the life and times of Lord Byron.

  The afternoon passed without event, but toward teatime the searchers signaled a find. Glued to the window, Grace watched the commotion by the water’s edge as the minions of the law bustled around the thing they had recovered from the cold deep water.

  At last the body of Danny Delon was loaded into an ambulance and carted off into the dusk.

  The official cars departed. The tarn was once again still as black glass, reflecting the sinking sun and crooked shadow of trees.

  The guttural roar of a Harley split the silence. As Grace watched, a lone black figure on a giant chrome bike pulled out of the woods and disappeared down the highway.

  “They found him,” Grace informed Peter when he came upstairs for dinner a couple of hours later.

  “Did they?” He seemed unmoved. “Then I suppose we can expect another visit from the local constabulary.”

  He went in to wash, the subject apparently closed.