One Bad Apple by Sheila Connolly Page B

stay here tonight. How about you spend the night at my sister’s? I think I told you she runs a B and B, and I’m sure she’ll be glad to have you.”
    “I don’t want to be any bother,” Meg protested. And I don’t want to pay the going rate for a room either. It had already been an expensive few days, and it would get worse if she had to find herself a lawyer.
    He seemed to read her thoughts. “It’s off-season, and if Rachel hasn’t got a booking by now, the bed’s going begging anyway. She won’t mind.”
    “All right, I guess,” Meg said. Much as she hated to admit it, she felt profoundly relieved that she didn’t have to stay in the house, at least for this one night.
    “I’ll give Rachel a call.” Seth went into the dining room to use his cell phone, and Meg cleared away the untouched coffee mugs while keeping an eye on the activities outside.
    He was back in under a minute. “You’re all set. Why don’t you let me drive you over when we’re done here? I can swing by tomorrow morning and bring you back. Okay?”
    “Isn’t that out of your way?”
    “It’s no trouble.”
    Meg sighed and said, “Thank you. That’d be very kind of you.”
    “Well, then, I’d better go out and see how the clean-out is going.”
    Meg watched him as he joined the rest of the men clustered around the hole in the driveway, and then she turned away. She didn’t want to see what came out of it. She couldn’t allow herself to think of that sodden corpse as Chandler, someone she had known intimately, someone she had once cared about. Whatever had happened between them, he didn’t deserve to die that way. And she didn’t deserve to have to clean up the mess.

8

    The afternoon dragged on interminably. The light was fading from the sky before the various teams of people finished collecting whatever they thought might be evidence, and the body was bundled up and carted away. After the last official vehicle had pulled away, Seth reappeared at the back door. “Listen, you have any plans for eating?”
    Meg realized she had completely forgotten lunch. “No, I haven’t even thought about it.”
    “You look like you could use some food. I thought maybe we could stop in Northampton on the way to Rachel’s.”
    Seth looked like an embarrassed schoolboy, and Meg was touched. And she realized she was hungry. “Okay, sure. Let me grab some clothes for tonight, and I’ll be good to go. Give me five?”
    “Deal.” He smiled more openly this time.
    She made her way to the bedroom at the back of the house that she had been using since she arrived. Based on the out-of-date flowered wallpaper, she guessed that the sisters Lula and Nettie had staked out the two front rooms, and subsequent tenants hadn’t bothered to change anything. From the look of the back bedroom, there had been few guests. The room reeked of mothballs and abandonment. Still, it was reasonably clean and quiet, and it suited Meg for now.
    She sat heavily on the creaking bed, glad for the moment of silence. She felt numb. Chandler was dead, and all she could summon up was a combination of sadness and annoyance. Not exactly overwhelming grief. She had never met any of his family, and she wondered who the police would notify of his death— and who would actually miss him.
    Being suspected of killing him was unsettling. If it weren’t so personal, she would have found it amusing: Chandler’s last joke. She was the most law-abiding person she knew, and the idea of committing a murder, much less wrestling with an inert body, was beyond her comprehension. But how was she supposed to convince the detective of that? He didn’t know her. Nobody in Granford knew her, and they couldn’t vouch for her. And her Boston friends … would remember when she was with Chandler. What would they say?
    Enough, Meg! Right now she was tired and hungry, and those were things she could do something about. She scrabbled through the drawers of the walnut dresser, hunting for