by Maddy Hunter
I heaved a hopeless sigh.
Wrong again.
“I’ve established a tentative timeline,” Tredinnick announced from the front of the room, “but I’d appreciate your helping me fill in the blanks. Mrs. Miceli rang up 999 at 7:02 this morning according to the emergency services log. I’ll be needing to know what happened before then.”
Wally and I had knocked on every door, requesting the gang’s immediate presence in the lounge, and, true to form, they’d arrived promptly, rolling their suitcases with them and snugging them by their legs like they did in the airport.
“Before we begin,” said Tredinnick, looking confounded, “is there a reason why you went through the trouble of dragging your luggage out here with you?”
“Anti-theft protection,” volunteered Margi. “A new policy we started implementing at breakfast. If we carry all our valuables around with us, the thief won’t have anything to steal if he breaks into our rooms.” She rested a loving hand on the top of her spinner. “No way is he going to get his paws on my hand sanitizer.”
“Emily forced our hand,” accused Dick Teig. “She told us there’d be no more room service, so we had to find another way to protect our stuff.”
I hung my head. Oh, God.
Tredinnick’s tone turned sardonic. “You don’t find your solution a trifle…inconvenient?”
“It’s not bad,” confessed George, “unless you’ve got a suitcase with a screwy wheel. Which reminds me, did anyone bring a travel- size can of WD-40 with them?”
“Returning to the matter at hand,” said Tredinnick, clicking his pen with a slight show of attitude, “where are the cooks?”
Nana and Jackie raised their hands.
“What time did you start serving breakfast this morning?”
“When folks was at the table.”
“What time was that?”
Nana shrugged. “I dunno. I was so busy I didn’t pay no attention.” She caught Jackie’s eye. “You know what time we begun?”
“It was right after I suffered my injury.” She stuck her forefinger in the air to display the foreshortened stump of her nail to Tredinnick. “I might have to lop them all off now to make them all the same length. And I didn’t bring any polish with me for touchups because the bottles always leak in transit.”
“What time was that?” Tredinnick repeated.
“I don’t know! How would you expect me to glance at a clock when I’m dealing with a level-one trauma?”
He scribbled something on his pad before nodding toward the gathered crowd. “What time did you eat breakfast?”
“Awhile after we showed up,” said Osmond.
“Specific time, please?”
Shrugs. Lip twisting. Googly eyes.
Tredinnick frowned. “Are you telling me that not one of you bothered to look at your watch or cell phone to check the time?”
“They were in our suitcases,” explained Helen.
“For their own protection,” reiterated Margi.
I gazed heavenward. Seriously, Lord?
“Does the inn provide nightstand clocks in your suites?” persisted Tredinnick.
“You bet,” said Dick Stolee. “Digital models that light up the whole room.”
“Did any of you check your room clocks to see what time you came out to breakfast this morning?”
“I did,” enthused Alice. “It was precisely six o’clock. I was the first one to arrive.”
“Thank you. Was breakfast scheduled to be served at six?”
“It was scheduled for seven thirty,” Alice continued, “but I wanted to get there before all the good seats were taken. I didn’t want to get stuck with the obstructed spot again.”
“The good seats disappear fast,” asserted George, “so you gotta get there early.”
Tredinnick scratched his jaw. “What is your definition of a good seat?”
They sidled slow, bewildered glances at each other, as if they’d never bothered to think about that before.
He made a doodle on the page. “I’ll note your response as a question mark. How soon after the lady claimed the good seat this morning did the rest of you arrive?”
“A couple of minutes,” said Dick Teig.
“More like a couple of seconds,” argued Dick Stolee. “The rest of us were neck-and-neck in the hallway and gaining fast, but our suitcases slowed us down a bit.”
Tredinnick made another notation. “So all of you arrived within a few minutes of each other?”
“More like seconds,” grumbled Dick Stolee.
“For the purposes of my timeline, I have you sitting down at approximately six o’clock. How soon after you sat down did you see Ms. Holloway exit through the lounge on her way to the spa?”
“Couple of minutes,” said Dick Teig.
“It was not,” argued Helen. “You were going on about websites that buy gold doubloons for a good fifteen minutes before we ever saw that girl.”
George rubbed his forehead. “You sure it wasn’t longer than that?”
“Seemed a lot longer,” droned Grace.
Dick folded his arms across his chest. “Well, it only felt like a couple of minutes to me.”
“That’s because the only time you find conversation worthwhile is when you’re doing the talking and everyone else is doing the listening,” chided Helen.
“Show of hands,” Osmond piped up. “How many people—no, wait. Emily says we can’t vote anymore. Forget I said that.”
Tredinnick’s pen suddenly snapped in two, shooting out from between his fingers and flying off in different directions like tiny missiles. He looked as if he might be counting to ten as he watched the pieces land on the floor. “Let’s try this again, shall we? Did any of you see Ms. Holloway leave the inn this morning?”
“Everyone at the table saw her,” affirmed Tilly, “except Osmond. He forgot his eyeglasses back in the room.”
“She waved to us,” recalled Lucille.
“And she told us not to eat all the food before she got back,” added George.
Tredinnick actually smiled. “Brilliant. So you saw Ms. Holloway enter the lounge sometime after six o’clock. Did any of you see Caroline Goodfriend trek through the lounge on her way to join Ms. Holloway in the spa?”
Eyes shifted. Brows lowered.
“I don’t remember seeing her at all,” admitted Dick Stolee.
“Me neither,” said Dick Teig.
“I saw a flash of something in the corner of my eye,” Lucille revealed, “but I figured it was the tail end of an optical migraine.”
“Did she come through before or after the second helping of bacon arrived?” Grace asked Tredinnick. “Because when Jackie set that platter on the table, it was a free-for-all. The fellas wouldn’t have noticed if a bomb had gone off in their shorts.”
I didn’t want to quibble about the guys’ level of unawareness, but even they might have noticed that.
“I saw Caroline,” Tilly affirmed with ironclad conviction. “I believe she left a good thirty to forty minutes after Heather, just as we were finishing up our meal. And a few minutes later, she ran back through the lounge as if the hounds of hell were nipping at her heels.”
“To my room,” I spoke up. “To tell me about Heather. And that was precisely seven o’clock because I checked my wristwatch.”
“Surprising it was on your wrist and not in your suitcase,” Tredinnick quipped.
“Yeah. I didn’t get that memo.”
He scanned his notes. “So most of you can verify that Ms. Holloway left the inn sometime after six o’clock. One of you saw Ms. Goodfriend leave thirty to forty minutes later. The majority of you were too preoccupied with bacon to notice anything. One of you thought Ms. Goodfriend’s jaunt through the lounge was a visual anomaly. And you haven’t a clue what time you actually ate breakfast beca
use you finished eating at least a full half hour before you were scheduled to begin. Does that cover everything?”
Heads bobbing. Satisfied smiles.
“Mrs. Sippel,” Tredinnick’s gaze riveted on Nana, “none of your bloggers were at the table when you started serving much earlier than you’d indicated, were they?”
“Nope. And I can’t say’s I blame ’em. They probably got wind that all the good seats was gone.”
“So how did you plan to deal with that?”
“I set vittles aside and stuck ’em in that oven what stays warm all the time. I wasn’t gonna let them folks starve. Emily wouldn’t abide that.”
“Constable?” Caroline wandered into the lounge, looking wobbly-legged, dazed, and in need of an arm to lean on. I hopped out of my chair and hurried to her side.
“Are you okay?” I circled my hand around her forearm.
“It’s the pill. I took more than the recommended dosage, so I’ve got spaghetti legs.” She gestured toward Tredinnick. “Before I conk out, I wanted to ask you about Heather’s belongings. Did you find her neck wallet in the spa?”
“If it’s there, the evidence team will collect it.”
“Okay, but…just to let you know. The fob-seal that she and Kathryn Crabbe have been haggling over? Heather stashed it inside her neck wallet before she left the room this morning, so you should probably have your people double-check to make sure it’s still there. It’s probably worth something.”
“Thank you for that. Excuse me for a moment.” While Tredinnick limped into the dining room to make a call, I ushered Caroline back to her room and helped her into bed, taking note of the straight-back chair she was probably using to secure her door.
“Be sure to lock up when I leave. Okay?” I didn’t want to make things any easier for Spencer and August than they already were.
She nodded groggily, offering scant proof that she’d follow through.
“Are you going to be alert enough to wedge your chair under the doorknob, Caroline?”
She responded with a sublime facial twitch that might have developed into a smile if her eyes hadn’t fluttered shut first.
“Caroline?”
Her pills had obviously kicked in big-time because she was dead to the world.
Reluctant to remove her key from her room, I nonetheless grabbed it off the nightstand and exited into the hall, locking the door behind me. Wally could slip into her room with his master key and replace it on her nightstand before she even realized it was gone.
I hurried back to the lounge to find that Constable Tredinnick’s phone call had set off another alarm bell in his investigation.
“The fob-seal that was purportedly in Ms. Holloway’s neck wallet is missing,” he announced as I walked into the room. He lasered a look at me. “Where do I find Kathryn Crabbe?”
seventeen
To Kathryn’s utter indignation, he turned her room inside out and upside down looking for the fob-seal but came up empty-handed. “I told you I don’t have it,” she railed as he marched her into the office for her interview. “This is police brutality. The entire world is going to hear about this deliberate miscarriage of justice in my blog. And the full force of global opinion will come raining down on your he—”
He closed the door behind them.
So he hadn’t found the fob-seal, but I wondered if he might have run into a pair of yellow ankle-tie flats.
Thirty minutes later Kathryn exited the office a supposedly free woman, storming back to her room minus handcuffs or leg irons. However, the fact that she slammed her door hard enough to rattle the china hinted that she was infuriated. I’d have to deal with the fallout from her latest snit later, but I’m not sure why she thought she deserved a pass in the investigation. She’d been at odds with Heather from the beginning—from wanting to have her stripped of her Janeite status, to claiming ownership of the fob-seal, to accusing her of trying to kill her at St. Michael’s Mount. With the fob-seal missing, what made her think she’d be immune to scrutiny?
Was it possible she’d committed murder to take possession of the artifact? Could she have followed Heather out to the spa without anyone seeing her? But how could a woman of Kathryn’s impressive physical stature skulk from place to place without being noticed? Lance’s killer had escaped detection so far, but—
A red flag popped up in my brain as I made a detour into barely charted territory, noting a gruesome pattern.
Kathryn suffers humiliation at the hands of her husband, a chef, and lo and behold, another chef who humiliates her suddenly ends up dead.
Kathryn suffers the humiliation of being online shamed by Heather’s Austen devotees, and lo and behold, Heather ends up dead.
Was that a coincidence? Did it seem that everyone who humiliated Kathryn ended up dead? Or was the pattern so blatant that even Tredinnick would disregard it as being too obvious to be believed?
Had he even remembered to ask her about her husband during her interview?
I ambushed him on his way to his car after he’d completed his amazingly brief interrogation of Mason, Spencer, and August. The SUV had finally departed after cordoning off the spa with blue and white police tape, so his squad car was the only vehicle parked in the lot. “You’ve decided against hauling any of my guests off to jail?”
“There’s nothing that places them at the scene of the crime, Mrs. Miceli, at least not yet. But I took their fingerprints, so we’ll see if that changes anything.”
“Did you happen to question Kathryn about her husband?”
“I did remember to do that. There’s no love lost there, but loathing one’s ex-husband isn’t a crime.”
“It could be a motive for committing one.”
He leaned wearily on his cane. “I suspect that any solicitor hoping to prove that Mrs. Crabbe killed Lance Tori because she transferred her repugnance of her husband to the chef would find the feat next to impossible.” He sighed, bobbing his head toward the inn. “Your bloggers were unable to shine any light on what transpired this morning. Mr. Chatsworth claimed to have slept through the entire incident, and Mr. Blunt and Mr. Lugar vouched for each other’s whereabouts once again, although Mr. Blunt did mention that he thought he heard a scream while Mr. Lugar was in the shower, but later attributed it to air in the pipes.”
“He claims to have bionic hearing, so maybe he did hear something. Did he give you a time?”
“Of course not. For all the fuss that’s made about you Yanks being workaholics, none of you ever bother to notice the time. What kind of workaholic doesn’t look at his watch? And at your request I did inquire if they’d established friendships with each other back in the states, and they gawked at me as if I were a daft cow. All three swear that the first time they laid eyes on each other was when they boarded the tour coach at Heathrow.”
“And if they’re not telling the truth?”
“I’ve no way to gauge that right now, do I?”
I sighed. “So…what do we do now?”
He lifted his brows and smiled as if he were about to reveal something good for a change. “With all the chaos this morning, I neglected to tell you. Enyon’s medical emergency turned out to be appendicitis, so he’s in hospital and might be released as early as tomorrow. They don’t keep surgical patients as long as they used to in the old days. It’s more like catch and release. I’ll drive him back here myself. So by tomorrow, with Enyon back in charge, you should be able to resume your normal schedule.” His smile deepened. “And with Ms. Zwerg accompanying you once again.”
“Bernice? Omigod! You found her?”
“Our CCTV in Exeter showed an image of a woman fitting her description exiting a passenger vehicle last night. The police haven’t located her yet, but they’re quite confident it’s your Ms. Zwerg.”
“She’s safe? Omigod! Thank you!” I threw my arms around him in a
moment of unrestrained glee, my heart beating out a tattoo that nearly took my breath away. “She’s in Exeter? How far away is that?”
“It’s near the M3—where it intersects with the A3052. On the way to Newton Poppleford? Branscombe? Seaton? Lyme Regis?”
“It’s on the way to Lyme Regis?” The puzzle tumbled together in my head like the pieces in a kaleidoscope. “That little stinker. Wait ’til I get my hands on her. Do you know why she might be heading to Lyme Regis? Because that’s our next destination. She’s probably planning to greet us on the seawall to surprise us. How in the world did she get to Exeter?”
“It appears she may have hitched a ride. We don’t recommend hitchhiking because of security concerns, but travelers still try it and drivers still pick them up.”
“I can’t believe she did that to us. The worry…the police involvement…the disrupted schedule. I should leave her suitcase behind to show her just how irritated I am that she’d pull a stunt like that. You should probably accompany us to Lyme Regis to restrain me, Constable, because when I see her, I might decide to kill her myself.”
“I’m sure the police will have a long discussion with her before you arrive, Mrs. Miceli. They might even convince her to offer you an apology.”
“I seriously doubt that. Bernice is into shoes, not apologies.”
“I’ll make a note to give you a bell with the results of Ms. Holloway’s postmortem when I receive them. I imagine you’ll want to share the information with her family.”
Heather’s family. Wally had called her parents earlier, but I wanted to contact them, too. I couldn’t say for sure if she was part of the bloggers’ thievery ring, but that didn’t matter now. Two parents had lost a daughter, so I needed to offer them as much sympathy as I possibly could.
Despite the happy revelation that Bernice was alive and well and would be rejoining us in Lyme Regis to make our lives a living hell again, the day dragged on interminably, the only relief from full-scale boredom being the appetizers that Nana and Jackie served throughout the afternoon. Baked brie with crackers and jam. Bacon-wrapped water chestnuts with teriyaki sauce. Smoked salmon triangles. Olive cheese balls. Mini grilled cheese sandwiches with chutney. Pears with blue cheese and prosciutto.