Лейганн Доббс - A Twist In The Tail

As Nero rounded the corner, he caught a foreign smell. Something spicy and uncertain. He closed his eyes and followed his nose, homing in until he was right on top of it.

He opened his eyes and blinked.

He was on the back side of the mansion’s West wing. This side wasn’t visible to anyone unless you were in the back, so Josie hadn’t sprung for flowers and shrubs, but the gardener she’d hired had spread a thick layer of fine mulch up close to the building.

In that mulch was the unmistakable print from a shoe.

‘You got something?’ Marlowe trotted up and looked at the print.

‘Yep.’ Nero glanced up. Right above the print was a window.

‘Looks like someone climbed out that window and stepped here in the mulch.’ Marlowe’s whiskers twitched. ‘You know how damp it gets at night. The mulch was probably wet and the weight of the person compressed it. Then it dried into a footprint.’

Nero was encouraged by Marlowe’s deduction, but she’d missed one important point. ‘I believe you’re correct. We need to get the humans out here right away so they can discover it.’

Marlowe made a face. ‘I don’t know. It could be from Mike or the gardener…’

‘Don’t think so,’ Nero said.

‘Why not?’

‘This is the West wing and if I’m not mistaken that window goes to the room Charles Prescott was killed in.’

Marlowe’s eyes flicked up to the window, then back to the mulch. ‘Then if that’s true, that print could be the print of the killer!’

‘Might be a good idea to pick something from my recipe file for breakfast,’ Millie said once we were back in the kitchen. She was seated at the long pine table with a laptop open in front of her, googling Tina and Charles. Mom was eating one of the leftover lemon poppy seed muffins.

‘ Therms-onsa-drough, ’ Mom said.

‘Huh?’ I was a little worried at her unintelligible mumbling. Had Mom had a stroke?

She waved her hand in front of her face and made a big show of swallowing. ‘I said, these are very dry.’

Millie’s attention snapped from the laptop to the muffin. ‘They are?’ She skewered me with a look. ‘The Oyster Cove Guesthouse prides itself on delicious breakfasts. I thought you were married to a famous cook?’

‘Don’t remind me.’ I hadn’t absorbed any of Clay’s extraordinary cooking skills, but so what? I was sure I could learn. Probably do a better job at it than him eventually too. Though, judging by the way my mother was choking and gulping down water, maybe I’d better speed up the learning process.

Meow.

I glanced at the window. It was open, letting in a nice easterly breeze that carried the salty scent of the ocean along with the perfume of honeysuckle bushes that ran between the mansion and the old carriage house. Out on the lawn, Nero and Marlowe were trotting back and forth, looking at the house. I got the impression that they were looking right in the window at me.

Millie went back to her computer work, her eyes on the screen as she addressed me. ‘If the muffins are too dry, you need to add more fat. People think it means the recipe needs more moisture, but that’s not the case. Try adding some extra butter or substituting buttermilk for regular milk.’

Meow. Meow. Meow!

The cat’s cries stole my attention again. They were getting louder, more insistent, much like the day they’d discovered Charles’ body. Hopefully they hadn’t found another one. I looked out again. Now they were pacing back and forth.

‘Have you fed them, dear?’ Millie asked. ‘They like to have kibble left out in the morning and the wet food with gravy in the afternoon, and don’t forget a treat at night.’ Millie glanced at the stainless steel bowls on the black and white checkered floor of the butler’s pantry – where we kept the cat bowls when Barbara Littlefield wasn’t around. The bowls were empty.

‘I fed them first thing. They must have eaten it all.’ I rummaged in the cabinet for the dry cat food and filled their bowls, then opened the screen door to call them in. They ignored me, running back to the corner of the house and then looking back at me.

‘Give them time dear, they rarely come when called. It’s some kind of cat thing,’ Mom said.

Millie looked up from the computer. ‘Yeah, they’ll come when they are ready. So, what are you serving for breakfast tomorrow?’

‘I haven’t decided yet.’ I was more interested in finding out if Tina and Charles knew each other, but Millie was typing so slowly I was beginning to wonder if that would happen in my lifetime.

Millie waved at the counter where the stack of cookbooks and recipes I’d inherited from her sat. ‘Now would be a good time to choose something. Pick something out and I’ll help you prepare it later.’

Good idea. I leafed through the stack of recipes on yellowed index cards and worn scraps of paper, handwritten in blue pen that had faded so much over the years that the letters were barely legible. Combine that with splotches of food stains and I was starting to think I had more problems than my lack of cooking expertise.

Hmm… let’s see. Quiche? Nope, I wasn’t ready to tackle crust. Smoked Salmon Croissants? Too fancy. Eggs Benedict? Sounded complicated.

Millie must have sensed my dilemma. ‘How about my famous sour cream coffee cake?’

I shuffled through the cards. A coffee cake sounded easy. Throw a bunch of ingredients in a bowl and bake. I didn’t see anything with ‘Coffee Cake’ marked on the top, but Millie’s recipes weren’t all labeled. ‘I can’t find—’

‘Eureka!’

Millie spun the laptop around to face Mom and me. ‘Look at this. Charles and Tina both worked for the Daily Crier in Noquitt, Maine at the same time!’

I bent over to see the screen. Sure enough, there were articles from Charles and Tina. ‘Looks like Tina wrote a food column.’

‘Makes sense the two of them would know each other then, they both write about food.’ Mom eyed the muffins again, but must have thought better of it, because she didn’t take one.

‘So we have our first suspect.’ Millie pointed at the computer screen proudly. ‘Tina had a secret relationship with the victim.’

‘Yeah but why would she kill him?’ Mom asked.

Millie pursed her lips. ‘Maybe he wanted to break things off and she got mad.’

‘I don’t know, Mike said the stairs had been tampered with as if the killer was trying to make it look like an accident, and that seems premeditated to me.’ I glanced out the window and saw the cats staring at me eerily with non-blinking eyes. Was that a signal that they were hungry?

‘Maybe he told her earlier and she asked for a meeting so she could kill him?’ Millie suggested.

Mom made a face. ‘You can’t be serious. Tina is cute. Charles was old, bald and pudgy. She’d probably be happy if he broke things off.’

‘And what about the missing cookbook?’ I asked.

Merow!

Millie and Mom looked out the window to see Nero rolling on his back.

‘I think Nero wants some of those salmon treats,’ Mom said. ‘Maybe Charles wasn’t really even working on a cookbook.’

‘Right.’ Millie turned from the window and rummaged in the cat food cabinet.

‘And let’s not gloss over the fact that Ava Grantham also knew Charles, and she’s the one feeding us this information.’ I watched a lot of detective shows on television and knew the drill when it came to working out suspects.

‘Good point,’ Mom said. ‘Maybe Charles spurned Ava at some point and she saw this as her chance to get even.’

Meroop!

With a loud battle cry, Marlowe launched herself at the window screen, her claws out like razor sharp grappling hooks. She clung on, her large round green eyes looking in at us, her belly heaving.