‘Are you sure it was a man? It might have been Barbara Littlefield. You know how she mothers that Lousewort.’
The cats all made a face at the mention of the noxious herb. Lousewort smelled like wet dogs and tasted even worse.
Juliette narrowed her luminescent blue eyes.‘Of course I’m sure. I have excellent vision. It was a man and he was short, fat and bald.’
‘That sounds like Charles,’ Marlowe said.
‘And that would explain why he smelled like wet dogs and seagulls,’ Nero added. All the cats knew the seagulls nested near the cliffs and liked to eat the flockenberries that grew on the cliffside.
Nero nodded sagely.‘Indeed, but what was he doing up there and why would that have anything to do with his death?’
‘We’ll have to sniff around town and see what we can dig up,’ Boots said.
‘I’ll listen in on Father Timothy’s confessions. Perhaps the culprit will confess,’ Juliette offered.
‘If only it would be that easy.’ Boots preened his mustache. ‘What we need to do is set our superior brains to thinking of the solution. Are there any other clues?’
‘Only a missing cookbook,’ Nero said. ‘Oh, and it appears that someone was trying to cover the crime up and make it look like an accident. Someone had sabotaged the stairs at the guesthouse to make it look like the victim fell.’
‘And it almost worked except Nero here discovered the truth and we showed the clue to the Sheriff,’ Marlowe said proudly.
‘The Sheriff does need a certain amount of… help,’ Stubbs said.
‘That’s why we need to get cracking on this.’ Nero swished his tail with urgency. ‘We need to find out if there was anything going on with the victim and someone in town. He must have been up to something to get himself killed. Can I count on you guys to scour the town, eavesdrop on all conversations and report back if you hear anything?’
‘Yes!’
‘Certainly.’
‘Of course.’
‘Consider it done.’
‘Good.’ Nero surveyed his gang of feline friends with pride. If there was something to be discovered about Charles’ behavior, they’d ferret it out. He also knew the most important clues would be closer to home. ‘Meanwhile, Marlowe and I will go sniff around the guesthouse and see what we can dig up.’
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I didn’t see any sense in doing something that would cause Seth Chamberlain to suspect me any more than he already did, so I was reattaching the crime scene tape to the door when Ava Grantham came down the hall and caught us.
‘Doing a little amateur detective work?’ At first I was worried she might be the type who would tell the police that we were in the room, but her tone was laced with curiosity and her eyes sparkled with mischief, so I doubted she disapproved.
‘No, the tape fell off and I was just reattaching it,’ I said, just in case my assessment of her attitude was wrong.
She surveyed us with narrowed eyes.‘Uh huh…’
Millie didn’t miss a chance to question another suspect. ‘Didn’t you mention that Charles was working on a cookbook?’
Ava shrugged.‘That was the rumor in newspaper circles. Why?’
‘Well do you see it in there?’ Millie pointed to the bookcase.
Ava leaned over the tape for a closer look.‘No, those are all already published. His wasn’t published yet. He usually makes notes in one of those binders, you know the refillable kind that you used to use in school?’
‘A three-ring binder?’
‘Yeah, that’s the one.’
I glanced back at the bookcase. No three-ring binder. Maybe the police had taken it.
‘We didn’t find any binder in there,’ Mom said.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he just started that rumor to make himself look important and wasn’t even working on anything. He was washed up old has-been.’ Ava leaned toward us and lowered her voice. ‘It’s a mystery to me how the women still found him so attractive.’
‘They did?’ I couldn’t imagine anyone finding Charles Prescott attractive, and judging by the sour looks on Mom and Millie’s faces neither could they.
‘Yes, can you believe it? Of course he used to be a looker back in the day, but now… well you saw him. Nothing to write home about. But I heard he still had a string of women.’ Ava glanced down the hallway, then turned back to them and lowered her voice again, this time to a whisper. ‘He even had one here.’
‘Here?’ Millie looked aghast.
‘Yep, I saw Tina coming out of his room late the other night.’
‘The other night? You mean the night he was killed? Are you sure?’ Mom asked.
‘I’m as sure as a monkey’s uncle. But it wasn’t last night. It was the night before. See, I’d fallen asleep in front of the TV in the sitting room and I was coming up the back stairs over there.’ Ava pointed to the stairway at the end of the hall. ‘When I saw Charles’ door open, I must confess, I ducked into the bathroom and hid behind the door because I didn’t want to talk to him. But it wasn’t Charles who came out. It was Tina.’
‘Did she say anything about why she was in there?’ I still couldn’t picture pretty Tina cavorting with Charles, but stranger things have happened.
‘I didn’t talk to her. I ducked back behind the door and I guess she just slunk off to her own room because I heard a door close, and when I peeked out the hall was empty. She never saw me.’
Millie turned to me.‘Did you get any indication that they were that chummy?’
‘Not at all. It seemed like they didn’t even know each other.’ I thought back to the interactions I’d seen between Tina and Charles. Charles had arrived four days ago, Tina had arrived the next day. Had they acted a little strangely around each other? It did seem like they’d made a point to avoid each other. Was I reading things into it because of what I now knew?
‘Well that is his modus operandi,’ Ava said. ‘He has a wife back home, so when he has these affairs, he just pretends like he doesn’t know the girls. Oh, there were plenty of young girls at the papers we worked at years ago who were quite smitten with him. Though even then, I couldn’t figure out what they saw in him.’
‘Tina did seem overly upset at his death, didn’t she?’ Mom asked.
Millie chewed her bottom lip and glanced back at the door to Tina’s room. ‘Yes, she did. Was that because her lover had been killed or perhaps because she had killed him and was afraid of getting caught?’
‘I wouldn’t be so quick to pin the murder on her. She seems like a nice person and if you ask me, there are plenty of people who would’ve wanted Charles Prescott dead,’ Ava said.
Mom’s eyes widened. ‘Really? You mean like old lovers?’
‘Or his wife?’ Millie asked.
‘Not just them. Charles was a jerk. He wasn’t above stepping on someone to get ahead, throwing a co-worker under the bus or even blackmailing someone if he had something on them. I say good riddance to him.’ Ava shot a sour look into Charles’ room, then turned and strode down the hall.
We watched her go into her room before Millie turned toward the stairs.‘Come on, we’ve got our work cut out for us. If what Ava says is true, we need to prove that there was a connection between Tina and Charles.’
Six
‘I didn’t realize you were being so literal when you said we should go back to the guesthouse andsniffaround.’ Marlowe lifted her nose from the flower bed and sneezed. ‘All this sniffing is making me hungry.’
Nero gave an exasperated sigh. Marlowe still had to learn the art of patience.‘We can eat soon. First, we must cover every inch. You never know where the killer might have dropped a clue.’
‘Right. Every inch.’ Marlowe stuck her nose back into the flower bed, then moved along to the corner of the guesthouse.
Nero continued on his course. So far he’d sniffed up several toads, a grasshopper and a few gull feathers. The feathers gave him pause, but luckily the gulls didn’t come over from Smugglers Bay Inn often, which was just fine with Nero.