by Mary Bowers
She nodded.
“Then he might have been poisoned before we even got here.”
“According to you,” she shot back. “You’re the only one who noticed that. And you’re the only one who knew these two.” She turned to Patty. “Did this woman give you anything to serve at the party? Any liquid to add to a dish? Anything like that?”
“Now wait just a darn minute.” I said hotly. “I didn’t even know Patty and Coco were here in the area. They surprised me yesterday morning.”
“And right away, they told you about the party. You knew Fred Rambo was going to be here.”
“I did not!”
“We didn’t know who was going to be here ourselves,” Patty said soothingly. “I only knew Fred’s first name at the time, and I never mentioned it to Taylor. We just said a lot of people we met around the pool were coming.”
“But she knew Fred lived here. She knew he was very outgoing. She could have figured out he was coming.”
“I had no idea where Fred lived, and I haven’t thought about him in years.”
“He dumped you.”
“I dumped him!”
“Children, please,” Coco said. “This kind of thing is amusing on reality shows, but in real life, it’s just boring. Stop it. Edith, are you sure we can’t get you anything? Please sit down. You look like you’re about to fall over. I swear, we didn’t even know Fred. Why would we want to kill him?”
“But you knew him,” I said. “You were talking to him during the party, and he looked really interested. What were you two talking about?”
“Aha! If you saw that, you were here much earlier than you’re admitting. I knew it!”
“I told her about that,” Patty said. “Honestly, Edith, there’s no reason in the world any of us would have wanted to harm Fred – or anybody else, for that matter.”
Edith was shifting her eyes from one of us to the other, and after a pregnant pause, she muttered, “I guess that makes sense.”
“Of course it does,” I said. “Now help us out here. What were you and Fred talking about?”
Her eyes sharpened, widened, and I could almost see wheels turning inside her head.
“Edith?”
“I have to go,” she said abruptly.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Coco said. “You can’t come in here throwing bombs and then just leave.”
With no warning, the tiny woman seemed to become even smaller, and her gremlin face began to shrivel. She started to cry.
Patty, who had children and grandchildren, was the only one of us who knew what to do about sudden tears. She got up and went to Edith, putting her arms around her. I didn’t know how Edith would react, and I held my breath, but when Patty began to murmur soothing things, Edith sagged into her and allowed herself to be led to one of the comfortable living room chairs.
Within a few minutes, Edith began to compose herself and she got a faraway look in her eyes.
“He shouldn’t have done it. Not at a party,” she murmured, almost as if she were talking to herself. “He was always so cocky. I told him he’d better watch out . . . .”
Coco, Patty and I all looked at one another, then back at Edith.
“Shouldn’t have done what?” Patty asked gently. “You mean Fred? What did he do?”
Edith was still in the grip of some new idea. She just sat there, tightly silent, so I looked at Coco. “Did Fred do something strange at the party?”
She shrugged. “If he did, I didn’t see it. He was just talking to people. I didn’t even see him eat anything. He was just drinking wine.”
“There you are, honey,” said a man’s voice. I got to my feet and turned around, but Coco remained seated and relaxed. All she did was bend forward a little to see who it was.
Harold Foote was moving toward his wife as if she were the only one there. “I’ve been looking for you all over the place.” He looked around at the three of us. “I’m sorry to barge in like this, but she shouldn’t be here, where it happened. We knew Fred a long time.”
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Foote,” I said. “I don’t know if you remember me. We didn’t exactly meet last night, but I was here. I came in late, and then, of course, you left. I’m Taylor Verone. I used to know Fred, too, a long time ago.”
He nodded in a friendly way. “I remember you. You were in the kitchen when I came in to call for the ambulance. I remember Fred talking about you, too, back when the two of you were dating. He had quite a thing for you. Took him a long time to get over you.”
That didn’t make me feel any better, but he didn’t seem vindictive.
“Won’t you sit down, Harold?” Patty said.
“No, no, dear, I just came to find my wife. We’ll leave you three alone now. You’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Coco and Patty were talking about it at the party before you got here, about how this trip was going to be a surprise visit to an old friend. An old friend,” he added softly. His wife was still standing next to Patty, very quiet, very still. “Come on, Edie, we should go.”
She allowed herself to be steered away. Harold nodded a good-bye at us and guided her out the door.
“She knows something,” I said once they were gone.
“We should tell the cops,” Patty said.
“Why?” Coco asked her. “We’ve got Taters. Remember what the cops said? She’ll manage to dig it out of her, whatever it is.”
“We should tell the cops,” I repeated firmly. “Now let’s unpack our stuff from the beach and try to forget about last night for a while.”
Chapter 9
I didn’t get back to Cadbury House until after dark. Michael hadn’t called or texted me to ask me where I was. He hadn’t wanted to intrude on the girlfriend reunion, but when I finally came in he was eager to hear all about it.
I collapsed onto the couch beside him and gave him all the details: how many Heyers Patty had found at The Bookery, how they’d been fed milkshakes and desserts at lunch, Ed’s touching visit to the diner in the face of two strange women, and a precise estimate of how many square inches of Coco the new bathing suit covered. I think I actually put it in centimeters, since they’re smaller. He enjoyed every word, listening with a grin, chuckling in all the right places and only interrupting a few times to crack a joke. Bastet got between us and leaned in on Michael, rubbing her head against him and only giving me the occasional glance.
Bastet and I have a complicated relationship. Bewildering, actually. She definitely came to me that first day, not to Michael, and there’s definitely something holding us together, but it isn’t simple affection. Most of the time, she’s besotted with Michael, and when he’s home, she follows him around like a girl with a crush. With me . . . eh.
That’s why when she starts paying attention to me and showing up where she couldn’t possibly be, I worry. The connection between us grows stronger during those times, and not in a way I’ve ever been able to understand. I begin to feel controlled, somehow. (In that book Edson Darby-Deaver wrote about us, he used the word “possessed,” which is crazy. I am not possessed.) I tend to put it down to a cat’s finely tuned perceptions. When things are about to go wrong, she senses it before the humans do, and in those times, she expects me to do something about it. Michael, on the other hand, is only there to be adored.
So as I told Michael about my day with the girls, I watched her uneasily. She had that attitude of tracking the conversation, but that’s just a cat thing. They all look like they’re monitoring the human race for Central Control at times. Her attention was definitely focused on Michael, so after a while, I began to relax.
When I’d covered all the fun stuff, I sank back into the cushions and gave him the bad news.
“They’re pretty sure Fred Rambo was poisoned,” I told him. “We had a nice time on the beach, but unless the cops find out who killed Fred, I think the fun’s over.”
“Yes, I heard something about poison too. I’m so sorry for your friends.”
Before I could ask
him what he’d heard, Myrtle’s voice came from somewhere behind us, as hollow as a groan from the tomb. “Will your Northern friends be coming for supper? Because if they are, we already ate, Michael and I. They’ll have to have leftovers. Cold.”
“No, Myrtle,” I said without turning to look. “We just had grouper sandwiches at The Shack. With fries,” I added, thinking again about how the dieters had been going down without a fight at every meal. There was some progress on that front, however. Over the sandwiches, I had gone into my pep talk again – the one I’d given Patty earlier – and I had another recruit. We were serious-dieting, and we were definitely beginning tomorrow. Those five pounds were as good as gone. But I didn’t have the heart to nag about what we were eating at the time. We were all stressed out. And the French fries at The Shack . . . I sighed and went a little slack in the face just thinking about them. Hot and salty and plenty of them. A girl didn’t stand a chance. But starting tomorrow . . . .
I turned to Michael. “Coco and Patty concocted some kind of plan for a diet trip, where they’d both lose five pounds by the end of the week. I decided to join them. In fact, I’m leading the charge. So far, I think we’ve managed to gain a pound and a half each, but that all changes tomorrow.”
He was smiling adorably. As I looked at him, Myrtle came around the end of the couch and stood in front of us, definitely ruining the view.
Myrtle Purdy is actually Florence’s younger sister, but she acts much older. I wonder at the vagaries of the human gene pool every time I think about those two. Same mom, same dad, but shake ‘em up and roll the dice and here comes something completely different each and every time. If I can be allowed a metaphor, Florence was born on top of a sunny rock; Myrtle was born under it. Florence basks in the sun; Myrtle complains about the damp. Physically, they’re similar, only Myrtle always looks worried, while Florence looks like she’s smiling even when she isn’t. I think it’s her eyes.
Myrtle had been the Cadbury family’s long-time housekeeper, and when they decided to move away from the estate and rent it to me, I offered to keep her on, even though I knew exactly what I was getting into. But I also knew that if Myrtle didn’t stay on with me, her only option would be to move back into the house in Tropical Breeze that she and Florence inherited from their parents, and Myrtle didn’t get along with Florence any better than she got along with anybody else. Florence is a darling. I just couldn’t do that to her.
Also, I’m not so great at housework. I can muck out the animals’ cages all day long, but mop the kitchen floor? Just wouldn’t get done. Myrtle seems to find mopping floors therapeutic.
“Don’t worry,” I told her as she stared down at me, “my friends have a condo on the beach. I’m going to be spending much more time there than they will here, and they’re only staying for a week. I promise we won’t make you cook for us.”
“You’re not going to let them cook, are you? If they’re the ones who prepared the food for that party you went to last night, they’ve already managed to . . . well, you know as well as I do what happened. You were there.”
“Myrtle! My friends had nothing to do with Fred Rambo’s death.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
I stared at her for a moment, then gestured toward the recliner. “Have a seat. Just what did you hear? Has the gossip gotten all the way out here already?”
“Of course it has,” Michael said wearily.
“It’s not gossip if it comes from people who should know,” Myrtle said loftily. “People who were there.”
“Like who?” Michael and I asked together.
“Jason Adderley, that’s who. You must have seen him at the party. He was here at the shelter today, working on the floor of the third cabin, where the cats kept getting out.”
“He was?” I asked in surprise. I keep track of my volunteers, and before I’d seen Jason at the party I’d never even heard of him. Jason was good-looking enough to remember, but that wasn’t it. I would never have forgotten a strong, healthy man who could fix floors. And odds were he had a truck. All those guys do. People who are able to pick up and make deliveries for Girlfriend’s are worth their weight in gold, as far as I’m concerned, and add in the handyman skills? No, I wouldn’t have forgotten him.
He hadn’t been overly-friendly at the party. In fact, we hadn’t actually met him. He’d ignored us completely when he’d walked over and told Terri they should leave. So why was he suddenly volunteering for my shelter? The thought that somebody in the Orphans of the Storm organization had hired him to work on the cabin never entered my mind. We’re pretty good at getting things done for free. “How did he happen to wander in just when we needed a carpenter?”
“He’s Carlene Hathaway’s cousin.”
I nodded wisely. Carlene is one of my most dependable volunteers.
She went on, going into detail. “Well, he’s not really her cousin. He married her mother’s cousin – at least we all thought he was going to – her mother’s cousin is the same age as Carlene, you know –“
The word-of-mouth social network of the Tropical Breeze area was much faster than the one on the Internet, but it always went into loving detail. No word limits there. If I wanted to know what had happened this afternoon instead of tracing somebody’s family tree back to 1938, I needed to jump in.
“So he knows Carlene, and she told him we needed a carpenter,” I said.
“Well, if you want to put it that way,” Myrtle sniffed. “Anyway, he was invited to the party and he didn’t want to go, but his boss-lady ordered him to. Public relations or something.”
“We saw him there, but that’s about all,” I said. “Patty said something vague about Jason and Terri maybe being ‘together,’ maybe not.”
“Terri Jones is a tramp and Jason Adderley wears his jeans too tight.”
It was simplistic, but there was a certain logic to it. The workplace throws people together and keeps them there until the chemistry, if there is any, begins to foam up. I put it down as a maybe.
“ And that Fred Rambo,” she said, making it an expletive. It almost seemed personal. She didn’t even soften up much when she added, “May he rest in peace. Terri said she wanted Jason there because she knew Fred was going to be there and she didn’t want him pawing at her all night. That’s a direct quote from Jason. Fred Rambo liked blonds,” she added, lifting her gaze from my eyes to my hair.
I refused to let her put me on the defensive. “So Jason said he saw, what, something suspicious?”
“He said he didn’t see anything at all. Besides, you were there. What did you see?”
“Nothing. We got there late and I spent most of my time in the kitchen. I didn’t even get to meet anybody until after they took Fred away. What about you, Michael?”
“After Coco took you to the kitchen, he began to circulate again and I lost track of him. Actually, I spent most of the time talking to Betty. I hadn’t seen her in years. And it wasn’t too long after you left us that Fred got sick.”
Myrtle looked disappointed. Apparently, she’d pumped Jason for gossip and hadn’t gotten any from him, either. And while Jason had Myrtle to himself, I had a pretty shrewd idea that he’d gotten whatever information he’d wanted out of Myrtle.
“What else did you and Jason talk about?” I asked.
“Nothing much. He was just laughing about this little girl that came in with her family and was following him around. They’re renting one of the townhouses at the Resort, and they had a frog in the toilet.”
“They had a what?”
“A frog. A tree frog. It fell in. When Jason got there, he found another one clinging to the shower wall. Poor thing. The whole time Jason was working, their little girl was mooning around after him, getting in the way, standing at the bottom of the ladder and looking like she was going to climb up. It’s a wonder he didn’t fall off the roof. At the party –“
I couldn’t help myself. “Wait. Why was he on the roof? And, uh, frogs? Did the kids bring
them in?”
“No, they were there when the family arrived. Jason says it happens every now and then. The screens over the exhaust fans in the bathrooms get old and weak, and when the frogs fall out of the trees they sometimes go through the screen and down the exhaust pipe, which is right over the toilet. Kerplunk.”
She was looking at me quite seriously.
“You’d think a tree frog could hang onto a tree,” I muttered.
“Happens all the time.”
“It does?”
“This is Florida, remember? Anyway, Jason figured out just how that happened, got the frogs out, got up on the roof and rescreened the exhaust pipe, and everybody was happy, but this little girl’s been following him around ever since. When the family came into the party, the girl went straight for Jason and kept asking him questions and keeping him distracted and wanting to taste his drink, which was pure alcohol. The kid’s about eight. His boss wasn’t any help. She just thought it was funny. Anyway, the kids left before Fred died, so I don’t know why you’re asking about all of this.”
“All right, Myrtle,” I said slowly, counting to five, “You implied that he told you something important. Just what did he see?”
“Nothing. He didn’t realize anything was wrong until Fred was already down on the floor.”
I counted to ten. “Did he see anybody put anything into Fred’s drink, or into any of the food in the kitchen?”
“No. But you were there. Did you?”
“I already told you, we got there late and – oh, come on, Myrtle! What did he see?”
“He didn’t see anything. He heard something.” When she saw the look on my face, she went on without any more prompting. “He heard it from a woman named Candy Cutter. You must have met her. She was at the party. Personally, don’t know her – oh, all right, don’t look at me like that. I’m telling you, if you would only listen instead of interrupting me every two seconds. He saw her this morning when she was going out for her beach walk, and she told him the only one who got close enough to Fred to put anything into his drink was Edith Foote. Apparently, they were talking for quite some time. Candy thought it was rude, since Fred and Edith saw each other all the time anyway. They live right next door to one another. To stand in the middle of a party and ignore everybody else and have a private conversation was just plain bad manners. Candy was still mad about it, even though Fred’s dead now.”
