"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 310 - Death on Ice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

His forward momentum carried him along although his body was lifeless.
His
hands relaxed their grasp on the poles. They dangled from the wrist straps.
All grace gone, the broken black thing smashed down onto the concrete
hard
snow. The white particles flew up around his body as the skis snapped under
the
impact. The wooden crack served to reanimate the statue-still spectators. It
had come like a bolt from the blue and had left them as defenseless as would a
lightning flash.
The shot had come from the close packed blue-green firs that made an
avenue next to the ski jump. The trees made it impossible to see who had
fired.
The people exchanged frightened glances. You could see that they were mentally
tabulating who was in sight and who not.
Tight-fitting ski suit making it impossible to determine her sex,
Patricia
Stone made her way to the fallen flyer. She looked down at him. She had been a
nurse for too many years to even bother feeling for a pulse. She knew death
when she saw it. Who had done this? Why? Peter had been so likable... so
unlike
that old harridan he worked for, and the husband. What a pair the de Silbis
made!
Peter had been so nice to her when he was teaching her the elements of
skiing. He almost made her feel young again. Never by a flicker of his mobile
face had he made her know that it was an impossible task she was setting him.
Her muscles were too old, too tired to ever learn any new tricks. That sort of
kindness had been rare in her old maid existence.
Looking down at his tanned good looking young old face, she promised
herself that the matter would not end in a coroner's report of death at the
hands of some unknown person or persons.
She knew the power that the de Silbis couple held in this small town
winter resort. She had seen it in operation. She knew too that they would do
their best to keep this quiet just as they had the unexpected "suicide" of
that
nice girl two weeks earlier.
The people she was thinking about came up to her then. She watched Mrs.
de
Silbis' face. It was so pleasant, so red, so rosy cheeked. She looked so much
the middle-class good woman that it was difficult to think of her in any other
way.
Her husband, lean as she was stout, razor thin mouth drawn over
protruding, badly-fitted false teeth, was furious. His sallow cheeks were
drawn
in. He looked from the body of his ski instructor up to the nurse and glared
at
her as if she had something to do with the death.
Anger tightened in the nurse like a real live thing. She could feel
nausea
in the pit of her stomach as she tried to restrain her feelings. Aloud she