Clause & Effect
Page 24
“So he did set up a rendezvous with her, and when she met him at the historical society, he murdered her.”
What Grace could have revealed about him would have killed the political career he was about to launch. Since he couldn’t trust her to keep her mouth shut, he’d killed her and hidden her body, confident it would never be discovered.
“I guess we know now why he wasn’t enthusiastic about reviving the pageant. I’m surprised he didn’t try harder to stop the repairs at the historical society.”
“He couldn’t make too much of a fuss without calling undue attention to himself,” Hazlett said.
I thought back over my encounters with the mayor. “That wasn’t his biggest problem.”
“Oh?” Detective Hazlett asked. “What was?”
I took another sip of my drink. At that moment, I felt very much alive and was just tipsy enough to imagine I was being witty.
“He’d developed bad habits,” I said, “both in his manner of speaking, and in the way he dealt with those he saw as a threat. He just couldn’t stop repeating himself.”
A Random Selection from “The Write
Right Wright’s Language and
Grammar Tips”
by
Mikki Lincoln
If you want less trouble keeping to a budget, you should make fewer expensive purchases. Less refers to value, degree, or amount. Fewer refers to something you can count.
Be careful not to lose the loose change in your pocket.
Don’t overdo during strenuous workouts if you are overdue for a checkup with your doctor.
The blonde has blond hair.
When writing on stationery, one is usually stationary.
When you breathe you draw in and expel your breath.
A healthy person usually prefers to live in a healthful environment.
The principal stockholder forgot his principles when he tried to make a killing on the stock market.
The nurse’s aide came to the aid of the patient by helping him pour a glass of lemonade.
I remember the ’60s. I wore a 1960s’ outfit to a costume party.
Always spell out century references, and remember that the sixteenth century encompasses the fifteen hundreds.
Half an hour from now, on the half hour, there will be a number of half-price items on sale.
The rule is to use a before words that start with consonants and an before words that start with vowel sounds, so that old television commercial got it right when the actor said, “It’s an herb, Herb.”
From whence is redundant. Whence means from what place.
A character can grit her teeth when speaking, but for an author to write, “Go away,” she gritted. is just plain silly.
Acknowledgments
For this novel, which will be my sixtieth traditionally published book, I am grateful to many people, but especially to my husband. By the time Clause & Effect is in stores, Sandy and I will have celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary. For much of my career, he has been the “spouse with health insurance” so necessary to the survival of most writers. He has also been my beta reader for almost every one of those sixty books. I can always rely on him to tell me when I get something wrong.
One of the characters in Clause & Effect, that of Shirley Martin, the librarian at the historical society, is based with deep affection on the real Shirley Martin, longtime reference librarian at Mantor Library at the University of Maine at Farmington. I worked there as a library assistant at circulation for several years and Shirley was an inspiration on both a personal and professional level. With the permission of her widower, Robert Martin, I named the character in her honor. Sadly, Robert also passed away, just a few months after his wife’s death, but not before donating funds in her memory, and in memory of the cats who were their cherished companions over the years, to build a new wing at a local no-kill animal shelter.
Once again, Tom and Marie O’Day, who won naming rights to their characters at an auction at Malice Domestic, play a role in the story. Fred Gorton was my grandfather’s name. All other names are random and the characters who people this story are entirely fictional. If you think one of them is based on you, you are wrong.
One additional thank-you goes to Eileen Dreyer, the source of the true story that inspired the location and description of my villain’s telltale birthmark. Yes, she did use the real version in one of her novels. I altered it slightly for mine.