Mindful of Murder by Susan Juby EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Susan Juby
- Language: English
- Genre: General Humorous Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2.3 MB
- Price: Free
The new butlers stood in a line in front of the gleaming white yacht. They
wore dark suits and polished shoes. Their nails were clean and their hair
was neat. All but one were drunk.
“Excuse me!” called the photographer, who’d been hired by the North
American Butler Academy to take graduation day photos. “You there. Third
from the left. The brown-haired gal? Can you please move over one?”
Helen Thorpe, the only sober butler, changed places with a lean, thirtyish man. She was five feet, ten inches tall, half an inch taller than the man
she replaced.
“Better. Better. Okay, that’s better,” said the photographer, who was a
scurrying sort of person. He bent down and aimed the lens of his camera at
the row of nine butlers.
“Beautiful! Look at you. So tidy! Show me your best butler faces.”
The butlers kept their faces exactly the same as they would do
throughout their careers. Pleasant, professional, impassive. Among them,
Helen Thorpe somehow seemed extra still, as though her very molecules
moved more slowly. She watched the little photographer with clear,
thoughtful eyes. She saw that he was darting hither and fro on the dock, not
paying the slightest attention to where he was going. She saw that his
clothes, though clean, were not new.
The heels of his shoes were worn
down. He was making a strenuous effort to do a good job. The only
expensive thing on him was his camera, which was not brand new, but of
exceptional quality. He was, she thought, probably beginning his business
as a photographer. Something about the way he strived to keep them
amused and to get the best shots suggested an attempt at a fresh start.
Honest effort poured off him.
He knelt on a bench bolted to the middle of the dock, and then he
climbed up a pole with rungs on it, holding on with one hand and making
dramatic attempts to shoot with the other.
The butlers, who had been up all night, watched him work with welldisguised bleariness.
They’d kicked off the festivities the night before with
a lavish dinner at a fine French restaurant, followed by visits to a series of
bars and clubs. After they closed down a speakeasy at 3:30 a.m., they’d
gone to the beach for a sunrise bonfire. At five, they headed back to their
dorm rooms in the old mansion that housed the North American Butler
Academy, which, according to the marketing materials, was in the business
of “creating specialists in domestic excellence.” They cleaned themselves
up for the early morning photo shoot, which would involve group shots and
individual portraits to be used for their professional profiles on Butler.com
and the school’s advertising materials.
Helen didn’t drink and had quietly put herself in charge of keeping the
rest of the butlers from being roofied or otherwise coming to harm. “No
butler left behind,” she’d said to the youngest of them, a girl from Virginia
by way of Ireland named Murray whom Helen had retrieved from behind a
leatherette couch in the “quiet room” of a dance club filled with music that
sounded like multiple emergency vehicles converging on a construction
site.
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