Later that morning…
With the clean up after the breakfast service complete, and a belly full of bacon and eggs, and Lauren’s fantastic key lime pie, I took my grandmother’s sea-green Mini-Cooper and headed off toward my first suspect’s house.
Brenda Tippett. A local librarian.
Gamma had headed down to her secret armory below the Gossip Inn to do extra research on the suspects. Brenda was squeaky clean. Those had been my grandmother’s exact words. Ones she hardly ever said when it came to folks in Gossip.
My grandmother was a firm believer that everybody had a secret, and Gamma happened to possess an iron will to discover what those secrets were.
Brewer Lane was a short street that ended in a cul-de-sac. Not the best place for a thief to live if they wanted to make a hasty escape.
I parked the Mini-Cooper and studied Brenda’s gorgeous clapboard home. The front yard was neat, though the flowerbeds looked as if they were in need of watering, and the front door had been decorated with painted flowers.
The porch swing shifted in the brisk wind, and the screen door bumped against the frame occasionally.
I got out into the late morning warmth—a nice temperature since fall was finally on the way—and paused, lifting a hand to my forehead to shade my gaze from the sun.
Was it just me or was it awfully quiet this morning?
Sure, people had jobs to do and places to be, but the cul-de-sac was empty. Even Brenda’s home seemed oddly silent.
My spy senses tingled.
I opened the cute picket gate and started up the path to the front porch. Yeah, the flowerbeds were super dry. Why hadn’t they been watered? From the state of the house, it seemed like Brenda cared about her home, so why leave the flowers to wilt?
I made a mental note of it and jogged up the steps. I knocked on the front door, and it drifted open.
Uh oh. That’s not good.
“Hello?” My voice echoed through the house. A long hall greeted me—polished wooden floors and cream walls holding picture frames. “Brenda? Are you home?”
No answer.
A tense silence hung in the interior.
“Miss Tippett?” Gamma’s research had told me that Brenda lived alone. She was young and single, and had a lot of friends. Was it an invasion of privacy that my grandmother knew so much about everyone? Sure. But how else was an ex-spy meant to keep herself busy? Apart from building a kitten foster center-cat hotel combo.
“Miss Tippett?” I tried one last time before entering the house.
I walked down the hall, checking rooms left and right. First a living room, empty, but decorated in a homey style with floral covered armchairs and then an empty bathroom. I found the kitchen and stopped dead.
“Miss Tippett,” I said, out of reflex.
Brenda Tippett lay on the kitchen floor, her cheek resting against the tiles, giving me a full view of her lifeless stare and the strange red flush of her cheeks. She had stretched out one arm, reaching toward the fridge. A chair lay beside her—the one she’d toppled out of.
Two items were on the kitchen table. A water bottle, uncapped, and a slice of key lime pie, a single bite taken from it.
Miss Tippett wasn’t breathing. I didn’t want to contaminate the scene, but just to be sure, I withdrew a pair of latex gloves from my purse and snapped them on, then pressed two fingers to Brenda’s neck. No pulse.
Poisoning.
It had to be. Someone had fed Brenda Tippett a slice of poisoned key lime pie was my guess. This gave new meaning to the phrase “just desserts.”
I backed out of the room, hastily removing my gloves, then got my phone out and dialled 911, walking back out to the porch, eyes peeled as I talked to the operator and described what I’d found. On the porch, I faltered, sucking in a breath.
There!
Several muddy boot prints had been left on the wooden boards in front of the porch swing, as if someone had vaulted over the railing instead of using the front steps. I put the call on hold to snap a picture of the prints.
Who had left them? And how? The garden was dry, the grass too, so where had the mud come from?
And why had my main suspect just been murdered?