Killer Crab Cakes (6 page)

“There’s really no need to go into all of this,” Phyllis said. “Mr. McKenna wasn’t murdered. I’m sure the medical examiner will confirm that he died of natural causes. It’s an unfortunate situation—”

“Especially for Mr. McKenna,” the reporter put in.

“But it’s nothing like those other times,” Phyllis went on determinedly. “Now, if you have all you need . . .”

The woman shrugged. “For now.” She didn’t protest as Phyllis led her to the front door and closed it behind her . . . maybe, just maybe, a little harder than was absolutely necessary.

When she came back to the parlor, Sam was shaking his head. “I reckon we shouldn’t get too upset with the lady,” he said. “I don’t imagine it’s every day that a fella drops dead on a fishin’ pier around here.”

“I suppose not.” Phyllis paused. “Thank you for defending me.”

“Hey, you were stickin’ up for me, too.” He grinned. “We make a pretty good team.”

“I think so,” Phyllis agreed. She sighed. “I have to get back to thinking about my entry for the contest. It’s only a few days away, you know.”

“I know. I’m not likely to forget a dessert contest. Accordin’ to the paper, they’re having a gumbo cook-off, too. And funnel cakes.” He licked his lips in anticipation and looked so gleeful that Phyllis had to laugh.

“I know, you’re going to spend all weekend gorging yourself.”

“Maybe not the
whole
weekend . . .”

 

When Consuela had finished cleaning up after lunch, Phyllis found herself in the kitchen pondering her choices for the competition. Cookies, cakes, or pies? Or something a little more unusual? As far as she could see, there wasn’t any way to make her entry relate to the coast. A pie was a pie was a pie, no matter where it was baked. And while, say, peaches adapted well to baked goods, nothing about the sea did. You couldn’t make crab cookies!

And a crab cake wasn’t the sort of cake you entered in a dessert competition, either, she told herself, although she loved a good crab cake. Consuela had made some for supper the night before, in fact, that had been delicious. Maybe, Phyllis mused, she could make a different sort of crab cake: a cake decorated with crabs made out of frosting . . .

The sound of the doorbell drove those thoughts out of her head. Consuela and her daughters had gone home for the afternoon. Consuela would return to prepare supper, but the younger women were finished with their cleaning for the day. The Forrests and the Blaines were out somewhere; Nick and Kate were upstairs “napping”—and maybe they really were, Phyllis told herself; and Eve and Carolyn had gone to check out some of the art galleries, dragging Sam along with them.

At one time, given the romantic interest that Eve had shown in Sam for months after he moved into the house in Weatherford, Phyllis might not have been too comfortable about letting them wander around art galleries together. But since the past Christmas, when she and Sam had finally admitted the attraction they felt toward each other, Eve had backed off and started treating him as a friend, rather than a potential husband number four . . . or was it five?

“You’ll enjoy it, dear,” Eve had told him as she patted his grizzled cheek. “I’m sure at least one place will have paintings of John Wayne and Elvis on black velvet.”

“I can’t wait,” Sam had said with mock enthusiasm.

That left Phyllis to answer the door again. She hoped that this time it wouldn’t be someone as annoying as that reporter had been.

There wasn’t one person waiting on the porch; there were three: two men and one woman. All of them were in their forties, and Phyllis was surprised to see that the two men were twins, short, stocky men with sharp faces and sleek dark hair. She wasn’t sure why them being twins surprised her. She’d had numerous pairs of twins in her classes, and they had to grow up into adults.

The woman had dark hair, too, and she looked enough like the two men for Phyllis to realize that they were all siblings. Not triplets, though. The woman appeared to be several years older.

“We’re looking for Phyllis Newsom,” she said.

“I’m Mrs. Newsom,” Phyllis told them. “Can I help you?”

“My name is Frances Heaton,” the woman said. “I’m Edward McKenna’s daughter.”

“Oh, Ms. Heaton, I’m so sorry about what happened—”

“These are my brothers, Oscar and Oliver McKenna.” Frances Heaton’s voice was brusque and businesslike as she broke in on Phyllis’s attempt to convey her sympathy.

Phyllis nodded politely anyway as she said, “I’m pleased to meet all of you. I just wish it were under better circumstances.”

As she spoke she was thinking that Oscar and Oliver had probably been teased unmercifully about their names and about being twins when they were growing up. Both of them had that long-suffering look.

“Please come in,” Phyllis went on as she stepped back, holding the door. She motioned for the visitors to enter the foyer. When they had done so, she closed the front door and led them into the parlor. “Have a seat. Can I get you anything? Something to drink?”

Frances Heaton shook her head as the three of them sat on the sofa, her in the middle and her brothers flanking her. “We’re here to collect our father’s things.”

“Of course. I really am sorry. I suppose the police notified you?”

“That’s right. We drove down from San Antonio right away.”

They must have left immediately after the phone call bearing the bad news, Phyllis thought. There had been time for them to make the drive from San Antonio, but just barely.

She felt like she ought to say something else. “I didn’t know your father for very long, but he seemed like a very nice man—”

“He was an idiot,” one of the brothers said.

“He would have to be to trust
you
to run the company,” the other brother said.

“Stop it,” Frances said. “He never should have put either one of you in charge, and you know it.”

Phyllis sat there during the sharp exchange, trying not to look flabbergasted. Obviously, the McKenna siblings didn’t get along well, and they didn’t bother hiding it even in the presence of strangers, when most people would at least try to put up a facade of cordiality. The resentment and dislike between them had to run pretty deep, and from the sound of it they hadn’t cared all that much for their father, either.

Frances turned her attention back to Phyllis. “Have you already gathered my father’s belongings?”

Before Phyllis could answer, the brother on Frances’s left said, “He was our father, too, you know.”

“You always say
my father
, like he wasn’t even related to us,” the other brother said.

Frances made a noise that was halfway between a laugh and an angry grunt. “Sometimes I wonder,” she said.

“That’s a terrible thing to say!”

“Can’t you at least be civil, at a time like this?”

The three of them sat there glaring at one another, with Frances’s head swiveling back and forth like she was watching a tennis match . . . a tennis match she found very annoying.

Their bickering made Phyllis uncomfortable. She didn’t like it when families fought, and the hostility among these three was evidently of long standing. She started to get to her feet, saying, “I’ll go get Mr. McKenna’s things together—”

“Before you do,” one of the brothers said, causing Phyllis to sink back into the armchair where she’d been sitting, “I for one would like to hear exactly what happened. All the chief of police said when he reached me at the office was that my father had passed away unexpectedly.”

“Now who’s calling him
my
father?” Frances asked.

“It’s just a figure of speech.”

“So it’s all right for you but not for me?”

Phyllis fought down the impulse to tell all three of them to behave—and to use her teacher voice to do it, too. Instead, hoping that they would stop arguing if she told them what they wanted to know, she said, “It appears that your father had a heart attack, or possibly a stroke, while he was fishing out on the pier early this morning.”

“Who found him?” Frances asked.

For once her brothers kept quiet and allowed Phyllis to answer the question. “My friend Mr. Fletcher and I were the ones who discovered that Mr. McKenna had passed away. We were walking out to the end of the pier, and as we passed your father, he fell into the water.”

“You mean he had the heart attack at that exact moment?” asked either Oscar or Oliver. Phyllis wondered if there was any easy way to tell them apart. She had seldom seen twins so identical.

“Well, no,” she admitted in answer to the question. “He must have . . . died . . . a few minutes earlier. We didn’t realize that until Mr. Fletcher slapped him on the shoulder . . . you know, just a friendly greeting from one fisherman to another . . . and Mr. McKenna sort of . . . toppled over.”

“My God!” the other brother said. “You mean this guy Fletcher knocked Dad into the water?”

“It was an accident,” Phyllis said, “and it didn’t really make any difference because I’m sure your father had already passed away—”

“You can’t know that,” Frances said, suddenly leaning forward like a hound scenting something interesting. “For all we know, the two of you contributed to his death.”

“Sounds to me like negligence,” the brother on her right said.

“And a wrongful-death suit,” the brother on Frances’s left said.

That was all Phyllis could stand. Without even realizing how she had gotten there, she found herself on her feet, and as she glared at the visitors, she said, “Good heavens, what’s
wrong
with you people? Your father just died, and all you can do is snipe at one another and threaten innocent people with lawsuits?”

Frances’s chin lifted. “There’s no need to get unpleasant, Mrs. Newsom. We just came here to retrieve our father’s personal effects.”

“All right. I’ll get them.”

Phyllis stalked out of the parlor. She wished someone else were here so that she wouldn’t have to leave the three of them alone. They were all dressed in expensive clothing, so she didn’t really expect them to steal anything, but with people so—so
annoying
!—you couldn’t really tell what they might do.

She got the master key from the office and went upstairs. She assumed that the door of the room Ed McKenna had occupied was locked, but she didn’t know that for sure. As far as she knew, no one had even tried the door.

She grasped the knob and twisted it. Sure enough, it didn’t turn. McKenna hadn’t struck her as the sort of man who would go off and leave his room where just anybody could walk into it. She used the key and went inside.

He didn’t have much other than fishing equipment. An old suitcase that showed marks of long use stood empty in the closet. Several pairs of khaki pants were hung up along with some plain, long-sleeved blue shirts and white shirts. She found strictly functional boxer shorts and socks in one of the dresser drawers. Fishing outfits, Phyllis thought. McKenna hadn’t needed anything else because he didn’t do anything else while he was here.

He hadn’t been a poor man, though. He could afford to stay at the bed-and-breakfast when there were cheaper places in Rockport and Fulton, and even though Phyllis didn’t know much about fishing gear, she thought the half-dozen rods and reels leaning in a corner looked expensive. Sitting on the dresser was a spare tackle box fully loaded with what appeared to be every variety of lure and hook ever made. A single-minded man, she thought. She had no idea what Ed McKenna had done the rest of the year—although the comments made by his children told Phyllis that he had owned some sort of company—but when he came to the coast he had only one thing in mind, only one goal: to fish as much as he could while he was here.

She put the suitcase on the bed and opened it, then gathered the clothes and placed them inside the suitcase. She would take it and the tackle box downstairs first, then return for the rods and reels. She wondered briefly what had happened to the gear Mr. McKenna had carried with him out onto the pier this morning. Maybe the police had taken it, she thought. That was none of her business, though, and it would be up to McKenna’s children to recover it if they wanted it.

She closed the suitcase and fastened the latches, then picked it up and hefted the tackle box in her other hand. As she left the room and went out into the hallway, she heard voices from downstairs and recognized Sam’s deep, powerful rumble. He must have gotten back from his jaunt to the art galleries with Carolyn and Eve.

When Phyllis reached the bottom of the stairs, she could see into the parlor. Sam stood there with both of the McKenna twins on their feet, looking at him with angry expressions on their faces. Carolyn and Eve stood by, clearly worried, while Frances Heaton still sat on the sofa, wearing a smug smile now.

“I told you fellas I’m sorry for your loss,” Sam was saying. “I don’t know what else I can do.”

“Get ready to defend yourself in a wrongful-death suit,” one of the twins snapped. “That’s what you can do.”

“When our lawyers get through with you—” the other one began to threaten.

Sam held up a hand to stop him. “If you take me to court, you’re gonna be mighty disappointed, boys. Even if you won, which I don’t see how you can because I didn’t have anything to do with your daddy dyin’, I’m livin’ on teacher retirement pay. You ever heard that old sayin’ about gettin’ blood from a stone?”

“We don’t care. It’s not about the money—”

Carolyn spoke up. “Whenever someone says it’s not about the money . . . then it’s
all
about the money.”

“You stay out of it,” Frances Heaton said. “This is none of your business.”

“It most certainly is,” Carolyn shot back, “whenever someone starts threatening a friend of mine!”

A year and a half earlier, Carolyn had been adamantly opposed to letting Sam—or any man—move into the house. Things had certainly changed since then, Phyllis thought as she came into the parlor carrying the suitcase and tackle box.