Killer Crab Cakes (10 page)

“You expect us to risk our lives for a reduced rate?” Leo asked with a tone of amazement in his voice. “Forget it!” He grasped his wife’s hand. “Come on, Jess, let’s go.”

Sam’s familiar voice drawled from the doorway, “I reckon that’d be about the worst thing you could do, Mr. Blaine.”

Phyllis hadn’t heard him come up, but she was glad to see him. Just having him around made her feel a little stronger. As usual, he looked very much at ease, leaning a shoulder against the side of the arched entrance between the parlor and the foyer.

Leo wheeled around to face Sam and thrust his jaw out belligerently. “You’re not threatening me, are you, Fletcher?”

“Nope,” Sam said. “Wouldn’t think of it. But it seems to me there’s somethin’ you haven’t thought of, either.”

“And what might that be?”

“The cops’re liable to take it to be a mite suspicious if anybody goes runnin’ off so soon after Ed McKenna was murdered.”

Sheldon said, “Are you saying that if we leave, the police will think that one of
us
poisoned that man?”

“That’s crazy!” Leo said. “We’ve already been over that. None of us had any reason to kill the guy!”

Sam shrugged. “No reason that we know of. But if the cops start diggin’ around, who knows what they might turn up. And they’ll dig harder if they think somebody’s actin’ suspicious.”

“That sounds like blackmail to me,” Sheldon said with a frown.

“Yeah, I think it was a threat to start with, just like I said,” Leo added. “If we leave, you’ll tell the cops that I had a big fight with McKenna last night.”

“Did you, Mr. Blaine?” Phyllis asked. “I didn’t notice that.”

“That’s because it never happened! It’s a big, fat lie. But that might not stop you from trying to get back at me any way you could.”

With a frown, Jessica said, “I don’t really think Mrs. Newsom would do that, Leo.”

Leo waved a hand toward Sam. “Well, what about her boyfriend there?”

Sam straightened from his casual pose. “I’m not in the habit of lyin’ to the police,” he said. “Fact of the matter is, I try not to lie to anybody.”

“You could’ve fooled me, all that talk about us being suspects if we leave—”

“You’re already suspects,” Phyllis broke in. “We all are. I told you that. So what Sam says just makes sense. The police won’t want you to leave town while they’re conducting their investigation, and if you try to, it’ll make you look more guilty.”

“Maybe we won’t leave town,” Sheldon said, “but we could spend the rest of our vacation somewhere else in Rockport or Fulton. That way we’d still be available for the police to question at their convenience, and yet we wouldn’t be risking our lives by continuing to stay here in this . . . this murder house.”

Phyllis almost lost her temper at that lurid description of the bed-and-breakfast. Oak Knoll wasn’t a
murder house
, for goodness’ sake. It was a perfectly respectable establishment, and it had been for years. She couldn’t let this unfortunate incident ruin the place’s reputation. She just couldn’t.

But the Blaines and the Forrests weren’t going to be persuaded to change their minds, either. Leo had hold of Jessica’s hand and practically dragged her out of the parlor. He headed for the stairs, saying, “Come on, babe. Let’s make some calls and see if we can find some other place to stay. Someplace where they don’t murder their guests!”

Phyllis winced at that.

Sheldon and Raquel followed their friends. Raquel seemed to be the most sympathetic to Phyllis’s plight. She cast a glance back and shrugged her shoulders, as if to ask
What can you do?
Leo had his mind made up, and he seemed determined to bulldoze the others into going along with him.

Sam looked at Phyllis and shrugged, too. “Sorry,” he said. “I was tryin’ to calm ’em down and help ’em see that they were makin’ a mistake, but I reckon I just made things worse.”

“You just told the truth,” Phyllis assured him. “If they left and went home, it
would
look suspicious to Chief Clifton.”

Something else was on her mind, something that she told herself was completely irrelevant, and yet it wouldn’t let go of her thoughts.

Leo had called Sam her boyfriend. Was it so obvious that they had taken a romantic interest in each other? Phyllis believed that such things were best kept private, so she supposed she would have to start paying more attention to her words and her actions whenever Sam was around.

At her age, she certainly didn’t want anybody thinking she was making calf eyes at him, not even Sam!

A few minutes later, Nick Thompson came downstairs. His steps had a little bounce in them, typical of the exuberance of youth. He found Phyllis and Sam talking in the parlor and used his thumb to point to the upstairs.

“Hey, who put the bug up Leo’s, uh, backside, if you’ll pardon the expression? We heard him going on about how they were gonna pack up and leave. He was talking so loud he woke up Kate and me. We were, uh, catching a little nap before supper.”

Phyllis’s spirits sank. Now she had to go through the whole thing again. She managed a weak smile and said, “You haven’t heard the latest news, Mr. Thompson.”

“Nick,” he said. “Call me Nick.”

Phyllis was more than happy to do that, since Nick was about her son’s age and she had a hard time calling anyone that young
Mister
. She said, “Chief Clifton was here earlier.”

“Yeah, I saw what looked like crime-scene tape on Mr. McKenna’s door and figured the police must have been here. Why would they seal it off like that? It doesn’t make sense. I mean, he died of natural causes, right? There weren’t any signs of foul play . . .” Nick’s eyes widened as his words trailed away. He swallowed and went on, “Wait a minute. Are you saying that there
was
foul play involved in Mr. McKenna’s death?”

“He was poisoned,” Phyllis said. “The preliminary findings from the autopsy were that someone poisoned the leftover crab cakes he ate for breakfast this morning.”

“Son of a—! No way!”

Sam nodded and said solemnly, “Way.”

Nick sank onto the edge of the sofa, disbelief still evident on his face. “But that means somebody in this house must’ve . . . I mean, if the stuff was in the crab cakes, then it had to have been put there between supper last night and breakfast this morning, because nobody else died.”

Phyllis nodded. “It seems to have been aimed solely at Mr. McKenna. He said at supper last night that he was going to eat the crab cakes for breakfast this morning.”

“Yeah, but somebody else could have gotten into them, too. I might have decided to come downstairs and grab one for a midnight snack!”

“Good thing you didn’t,” Sam said. “I guess the killer didn’t care all that much if he got somebody else by accident, as long as McKenna died.”

“That’s terrible!”

“Murder always is,” Phyllis said.

Nick sat back and shook his head, not denying Phyllis’s statement, just in awe at the situation. “So that’s why the Blaines and the Forrests are leaving?” he asked. “They don’t think it’s safe to stay here?”

“You can’t blame them for feeling that way,” Phyllis admitted.

“Yeah, staying at a bed-and-breakfast where breakfast kills somebody isn’t something most people would do. I guess I can understand why they were upset.”

Phyllis didn’t want to make things worse, but there was no point in delaying the inevitable.

“What about you and Kate, Nick?” she asked. “Will you be moving out, too?”

“I don’t know. This is all so unexpected. I guess I’d better talk it over with Kate and find out what she thinks.” He shook his head again. “If she’s too scared, I couldn’t really ask her to stay. I mean, I can’t believe that anyone here would commit
murder
, for God’s sake, but somebody had to put that poison in the crab cakes.”

Phyllis nodded wearily. There was no getting around that fact.

Nick put his hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet. He had lost a lot of his exuberance in the past few minutes.

“I’ll let you know what we decide,” he said. “We may
have
to stay here tonight. It’s not going to be easy finding a vacancy this late in the day. But, uh, Kate may want to, uh, eat out somewhere . . .”

“I understand,” Phyllis said.

And she did. If the situation had been different,
she
wouldn’t have wanted to stay at a place where one of the guests had been fatally poisoned by something he ate there. She just wouldn’t feel comfortable at all.

That discomfort on the part of the public could spell ruin for the bed-and-breakfast, she thought, unless the murder was solved quickly and it was obvious to everyone that negligence wasn’t the cause of Ed McKenna’s death. Of course, it might be just as bad if Consuela or a member of her family turned out to be the killer. The bed-and-breakfast would share in some guilt by association. There wasn’t really a good solution, Phyllis thought . . .

Just as there was no good way to put off making that call to Dorothy any longer.

 

Dorothy was upset, of course. Phyllis wouldn’t have expected any other reaction from her cousin.

“We’ll drive back down there right away,” Dorothy said after Phyllis had filled her in on everything. “First thing in the morning. Goodness, this is terrible! I just wish . . .”

“What is it, Dorothy?” Phyllis asked, sensing that more was going on than her cousin had told her.

“It’s just that Wendy really needs me here, too. The baby has some medical problems. They may have to perform open-heart surgery.”

“Oh, no!” Phyllis said. “You hadn’t told me anything about that.”

“I didn’t want to worry you without any reason, in case things turned out all right. The doctors are still running tests, and they’re not sure yet what they’ll have to do.”

“Listen to me,” Phyllis said. “You and Ben stay right there and help Wendy and her family as much as you can. That’s the most important thing right now.”

“But Ed McKenna was murdered, you said!”

“Yes, which means it won’t help him for you and Ben to rush back down here,” Phyllis pointed out. “The police investigation will carry on whether you’re here or not.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s true.” On the other end of the phone line, Dorothy sighed. “That poor man. He’s been coming to Oak Knoll for years now. Staying there and fishing was just about the only joy he got out of life.”

“Do you know anything about him? He didn’t talk much at all while we were here.”

“I know he owns—or rather, owned—some sort of electronics company in San Antonio. They make components for radar equipment, I believe he said, and have a lot of military contracts. He’s been trying to retire for several years now. He even put his sons in charge of the company for a while, but one of them made some sort of mistake on a contract and cost them quite a bit of money, so Ed turned everything over to the other son. That caused a lot of hard feelings, of course. I could have told him that it would. Mixing family and business never works out very well.”

“Certainly not with
those
children.” Phyllis knew it was a tacky thing to say, but she couldn’t help herself, not after the unpleasant meeting with Frances Heaton and Oliver and Oscar McKenna earlier in the day.

“You’ve met them, have you?”

“They came by this afternoon. They drove down from San Antonio after Chief Clifton notified them of their father’s death. That was before we found out it was murder. Actually, they were here when the chief stopped by.”

“I’ve never met them,” Dorothy said, “but from listening to Ed talk about them, I don’t think I’ve missed much.”

“You haven’t,” Phyllis agreed. “It sounds like Mr. McKenna talked a lot more to you than he did to us.”

Despite the seriousness of the situation, Dorothy laughed. “It took years to find out that much about him, a little bit at a time. And now we’ll never learn any more, the poor man.”

The cousins shared a few seconds of silence, a bit of mutual mourning for a man neither of them had really known; then Phyllis said, “So, are you and Ben going to stay up there in Dallas and let me take care of things down here?”

“I really hate to dump this mess on you, Phyllis—”

“You didn’t have anything to do with it. You were four hundred miles away when it happened, remember?”

“Yes, but Oak Knoll isn’t your responsibility, and we should be there, sink or swim.”

“Don’t even consider it,” Phyllis said. “Stay right where you are and do everything you can to help your daughter and grandbaby. That’s the most important thing right now. Everything will be fine here.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible.”

To tell the truth, Phyllis didn’t, either, but she wasn’t going to say that to Dorothy. She made her tone as bright and optimistic as she could as she went on, “I’m sure by the time you get back down here the police will have solved the murder and the whole thing will have blown over.”

“Oh, I hope so. Dale Clifton is a good chief of police, and to tell you the truth, I’m not sure but what his daughter, Abby, is even better at police work. The FBI tried to recruit her while she was in college, you know, but she wanted to come back home and work for her dad.”

“From the sound of what you say, mixing family and business worked out there.”

“It certainly did,” Dorothy said. “I’m just going to tell myself that between the two of them, they’ll find out who killed Ed, and people will see that no one at the bed-and-breakfast was to blame.”

No one who worked there, anyway, Phyllis thought. But it still seemed likely to her that the killer must have
some
connection to Oak Knoll.

Phyllis and Dorothy said their good-byes, with Phyllis promising to let her cousin know about any new developments right away. She had just hung up the phone when heavy footsteps on the stairs announced the arrival of Leo Blaine and Sheldon Forrest. Neither man looked happy.