Софи Райан - Buy А Whisker

It hit me then that Liz had said that she had gone home, but she hadn’t said she’d stayed home.

“Did you stay home?” I said.

“No,” she finally mumbled.

Rose and Mr. P. exchanged a look.

“Where did you go?”

Elvis was leaning against Liz and she was still stroking his fur.

“Nowhere really,” she said. “The house was so quiet without Avery and it wasn’t that cold, so I went for a walk.” She looked out the window for a moment. “I know it looks bad, but I didn’t do anything to Lily. I swear.”

I looked at Elvis, still contentedly sitting on Liz’s lap. Nothing in his demeanor said he thought that she wasn’t telling the truth—that was assuming his lying radar was working. Not that I needed anyone—human or feline—to tell me that Liz was telling the truth. I leaned over and put my hand over hers. “I know that,” I said.

“We all know that,” Rose echoed.

But how exactly was I going to convince the police?

“The first thing we need to do is come up with some legitimate suspects,” Rose said. “I think we need to know a little more about Lily. Did she have any enemies? We know a lot of people were angry because she wouldn’t sell the bakery. Have you all forgotten that?”

Liz made a dismissive gesture with her perfectly manicured left hand. “You really think someone here in town killed her over that?”

Rose’s gray eyes flashed with intensity. “You think that couldn’t happen? People have been killed over cheese, for heaven’s sake.”

“Cheese?” Liz repeated, the skepticism clear in her voice. Elvis’s ears twitched and he looked around. He liked cheese.

“Yes, cheese,” Rose said indignantly, color rising in her cheeks. “I read it online. It was somewhere in France. A man stabbed his next-door neighbor and buried the body in his basement. It was over some rare type of sheep’s milk cheese.”

“You think Lily stabbed somebody and buried the body in her basement and that was why she didn’t want to sell the bakery?” Liz asked. As if he could see where this was going, Elvis jumped down from Liz’s lap and came over to me, sitting down by my feet where he was out of the crossfire, and washing his face.

Rose made a face and set her cup down again. “Now you’re just being foolish,” she said. “The basement at the bakery is finished, all concrete and stone. Lily couldn’t have buried anyone down there. And where on earth would she find a curd knife in North Harbor?”

Charlotte looked over at me, a smile pulling at her lips. Rose and Liz were away, and if one of us didn’t stop the conversation dead, they could keep going for at least a half hour. I gave a slight shrug. I didn’t have anything.

“You know, the development isn’t the first time Lily has been at the center of a controversy,” Charlotte said slowly.

I looked at her again. “Excuse me?”

Liz was nodding. She tapped her cup with one pale turquoise nail. “That’s right. I’d forgotten about the business with young Caleb.”

“You weren’t here then,” Charlotte said to me. “It was, let me see, must be four years ago now. Lily’s ex-boyfriend, Caleb Swift, disappeared after taking out his sailboat, the Swift Current .”

I frowned. “What do you mean, disappeared?”

“He sailed out of the harbor, and about eighteen hours later the boat was found adrift. There was no sign of Caleb.”

I held up a hand. “Wait a minute. I remember Gram telling me something about that. There was no sign of a struggle on the boat, no blood, nothing out of place.”

“He was just gone,” Charlotte said.

“Caleb was a descendant of Alexander Swift,” Liz continued, “and his grandfather Daniel’s only heir. He was the golden boy of that family—smart, handsome, athletic, and he’d been sailing since he was six.”

Rose drank the last of her tea and set her cup down, her “discussion” with Liz forgotten. “Daniel Swift always believed that Lily knew more than she was admitting about why Caleb took his boat out the night he disappeared.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, leaning over to pick up Elvis. He settled himself on my lap and looked from me to Charlotte as though he were interested in our conversation. Maybe he was, for all I knew. “What does—did—Lily have to do with the disappearance of her former boyfriend?”

“He went to see her the night he vanished,” Charlotte said, setting her tea down on the small table between us. “There’s some security footage of him leaving the bakery, headed in the direction of the waterfront. It’s not very good quality. The Levengers had an old camera set up.” The Levenger family owned the Owl & the Pussycat bookstore next to Lily’s Bakery.

“A couple of Caleb’s friends seemed to think he was a bit obsessed with getting Lily back,” Liz added.

Elvis looked at me. I reached over to give him a scratch behind his left ear, and he started to purr.

“What did Lily say?” I asked.

“She said that Caleb had just dropped by to pick up some things of his she still had—a sweatshirt, a camera.” Charlotte shrugged.

“Caroline confirmed her story. She got to the bakery a few minutes after Caleb did.” Liz brushed a few cookie crumbs off her sleeve.

“She’s Lily’s mother,” Rose said, getting up and bustling around collecting the cups. “What else is she going to say?”

“You think that both of them were hiding something?” I asked.

Charlotte shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Liz handed Rose her cup and got to her feet. “What really matters is that Daniel Swift thought they were.”

Chapter 8

Rose and Mr. P. headed to the back room to start looking for more details about Caleb Swift’s disappearance. Liz pulled out her phone, I assumed to call Josh Evans’s office. Charlotte came over to me and put her arm around my shoulders. “I’m sorry you’re stuck in the middle, but we have to do this. Liz needs our help.”

One of the things I’d always loved about Charlotte and Rose and Liz was their sense of family. They knew it was more than blood or a piece of paper like a marriage license. They knew that family came from the heart. So what right did I have to tell them not to help Liz? And it wasn’t like I could stop them anyway.

I looked at Charlotte. “I’m not in the middle. I’m one hundred percent on your side.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Are you sure?”

I smiled. “Absolutely. And I’m just going to say one thing about Nick. For all he huffs and puffs and roars, he’s on your side, too.”

Charlotte gave my shoulders a squeeze. “He’s still going to have a cow,” she said.

I grinned at one of Avery’s expressions coming out of Charlotte’s mouth. “It won’t kill him,” I said.

Mac poked his head in then from the back room. “There are two buses pulling into the parking lot.”

“Canadians,” Charlotte said with a gleam in her eyes.

“Thanks,” I said to Mac. “Would you tell Rose I need all hands on deck? The case is going to have to wait for a while.”

He nodded. “Sure.”

Charlotte was right. The two busloads of people were Canadians, on their way back from catching a couple of Bruins games in Boston.

I’d already decided that the stereotype about Canadians being exceptionally polite was true, and this group was no exception.

“If it’s not too much trouble, could I try that guitar?” a man in his mid-forties asked me, pointing to a black Epiphone Limited Edition Special-I electric guitar that we’d had in the shop for only about a week. I’d found it, minus both E strings, at an estate sale. Now that it was cleaned up, with a new set of strings, I knew it would be a good instrument for a beginner.