Лейганн Доббс - A Twist In The Tail

I sipped my chamomile tea and dug into the ricotta pie. It was creamy and sweet. If I hadn’t been married to a chef, I would have been grossed out by the idea of ricotta pie. I mean wasn’t that something you put in a lasagna? But I’d had it before and Tony’s was much better than Clive’s.

As I savored the pie, I flipped through the recipe book. Charles was making a book of recipes that included berries. He even had a section of information about each berry. There were berry tarts, berry pies, berry dressings, even berry bread. There were even flockenberries in there. Maybe that was why he’d been on the cliff, to research the flockenberries.

I closed the book and sighed. ‘Well I guess these berries probably didn't have anything to do with Charles's death.’

Meow .

Nero hopped down from the sofa and trotted over to the old mahogany writing desk Millie had left for me, casting a glance back at Marlowe who soon joined him.

‘Yeah, I know. Dead-end right?’ I said. ‘Who would kill someone over berries?’

Nero jumped up on the desk and batted at a pen.

‘Unfortunately now, I'm back to square one.’

Merope. The pen clattered onto the wood floor.

‘Hey, cut that out.’

Nero stared at me with his golden eyes as he pushed another pen off.

‘You’re doing that on purpose!’

Mew. Purr.

He pushed another pen.

‘Okay, now I’m getting angry.’ I disentangled myself from my fuzzy cocoon, picked up the pens and put them back on the desk. Marlowe was sitting in the window seat and I patted the top of his head.

‘At least you’re a good girl, not tossing things off the desk.’ I gave Nero a pointed look.

Nero narrowed his gaze. Mew.

I kept petting Marlowe who was gazing out the window toward the Smugglers Bay Inn. It had stopped raining and the silver light of the moon highlighted the edges of the clouds and bounced of the rolling surf. Marlowe was probably thinking about getting out and catching some midnight mice.

‘Not tonight, my friend.’

Merow.

The tone of her voice indicated he wasn't very happy with that, but I was the boss.

Mreep!

Nero swatted a small pad of note paper off the desk. Was he jealous that I was paying so much attention to Marlowe?

Meow!

Marlowe leapt off the window seat and lunged for the paper, tearing it with her claws.

Meroo!

Nero jumped down and swatted at it, shredding a few pieces off.

Marlowe pounced, Nero swatted, pieces of paper flew.

‘Hey, hey!’ I intercepted the pad as it slid across the floor and picked it up.

Both cats screeched to a stop and looked up, innocent expressions plastered on their furry faces.

I looked down at the paper which was practically shredded into confetti. ‘Boy, you guys have sharp claws.’

It was only a cheap notepad, but I’d written a partial grocery list and now you could only see the last few letters of the words. Now what was the food that ended in ‘ery’ that I’d wanted? Celery? What other words ended in that? This was like the partial note that had been found in Charles’s room that the police had assumed was the review he’d been killed for.

I’d assumed Charles had been killed because of a review too and that turned out to be wrong. If my assumptions about the motive behind Charles’s death were wrong, then maybe that partial piece of paper wasn’t a review after all.

I rushed to my phone to look at the picture of the note that Millie had texted to me.

... ull

... ick

... son

What if ‘ull’ was for gull. The gulls were sick. Was it possible the letter had something to do with the reason for that? That last word ended in ‘son.’ Poison? Gull, sick, poison . Charles had been seen on the cliffs. What if he’d stumbled upon some evidence pertaining to what was happening to the gulls? And what if he knew who was behind it? Ava had mentioned that Charles wasn’t a nice man. He wasn’t beyond throwing someone under the bus or lying or cheating. And he needed money.

What if the note was a blackmail note? Someone being blackmailed would have a much deeper motivation to kill Charles than someone he was writing a bad review about.

But if this was a blackmail note and if the note really was the reason Charles was murdered, then who was he blackmailing and what did he have on them?

Fifteen

The next morning, I arranged the slices of ricotta pie on a fancy plate so that no one would realize I’d taken a slice out the night before. With only four people at the guesthouse, there was plenty of pie. I just wanted it to look nice on the buffet. But one can’t have only pie for breakfast, so I also got out some eggs and bacon. I was cracking the eggs when Mom and Millie burst through the kitchen door.

‘Josie! Bad news! Seth Chamberlain informed me that Tony Murano can’t be the killer. He has an alibi.’ Millie pushed me aside and took over egg duty. Fine by me, I didn’t really want to scramble them anyway and besides, I was bursting to tell them about my visit from Tony and my new suspicions about why Charles was killed.

As if summoned by Millie’s voice, Nero and Marlowe trotted into the kitchen and sat at her feet, gazing up at her.

‘I know. And there’s more.’ I moved to the bacon, which was crackling and sizzling. The cats swerved their gaze in my direction. I removed the fully cooked pieces and put them on a paper towel to drain, then added a few more slabs to the pan.

Millie turned to look at me. ‘Do tell.’

I told them about my visit from Tony and how Tina hadn’t been having an affair with Charles, but had been in his room to take the cookbook.

‘Hmmm, well, that is a bummer,’ Millie opened the spice drawer and started fishing around. ‘Where’s the vanilla? It’s a secret ingredient for the eggs.’

‘Should be in there.’ I peered in and spied it way in the back. ‘There it is.’

‘So now what?’ Mom had helped herself to a piece of ricotta pie and was sitting at the table. ‘Seems like we have to start from square one with the suspects.’

‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘I think we might have been barking up the wrong tree with the review angle anyway.’

Millie poured eggs into the pan and started mixing them around while I told them about my suspicions that the note was really a blackmail note having to do with the gulls.

‘You don’t say?’ Mom glanced toward the cove. ‘Do you think someone is harming the gulls on purpose?’

‘Maybe. Charles was seen on the cliff and that’s where they nest. He might have discovered someone doing something to their nests.’ I lowered my voice. ‘I already have some suspects.’

‘Who?’ Millie rummaged for serving dishes and then started spooning the eggs into a silver bowl with a lid.

‘Well, now let’s think of this logically,’ Mom said, her forkful of ricotta pie hovering near her lips. ‘The partial note was found in Charles’s room, which seems to indicate the killer was in his room. So who visited Charles?’

I thought about that for a second as I layered the crispy bacon onto a white ironstone platter. ‘I don’t think anyone came to visit him. At least no one that I saw.’

‘Ava Grantham said she saw Tina in his room,’ Millie pointed out.

‘But Tina was there because she was stealing the cookbook. Charles wasn’t even at the guesthouse then, because she’d seen him on the cliff.’ I picked a piece of bacon out of the pile and crunched.

‘He could have gotten the letter earlier, maybe he confronted the person and they tore it up and Charles took part of it back with him.’

‘But the killer had to have been in the guesthouse at some point, either the night they killed Charles or when they sabotaged the room. And no one saw anyone who wasn’t supposed to be here,’ Millie said. ‘With Josie, Flora and Mike around I would think someone would have seen something.’