Death by Chocolate Frosted Doughnut (A Death by Chocolate Mystery Book 3) by Sarah Graves

Author:Sarah Graves [Graves, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Books
Published: 2020-02-25T06:00:00+00:00

Seven

Inside, the house was all one big room downstairs, with knotty pine paneling made from real pine and salvaged steel beams stretching across the ceiling, holding it up.

I took in as much as I could from where I stood. The kitchen held an old soapstone sink with a hand pump on it and a squat black woodburning stove with a kettle simmering quietly on the back burner. A notch-eared white cat slept in a cardboard box by the stove.

“Sit.” Karen Carrolton hadn’t turned a hair at my comment about murder, but she’d let us in. Now she waved us to the large cluttered living area, where two plaid-upholstered armchairs and a brown-and-yellow tweed sofa formed a semicircle in front of another stove.

A coffee table was piled with papers in neatish stacks. Plants in pots on windowsills looked watered and well-kept, and the red and yellow onions, newly harvested and spread out across newspapers on a table, looked nearly dry enough to put away for the winter.

From her garden, I supposed. The net bags for storing them were all laid out neatly there, too. The brown dog’s bed was near the stove in the living area; when he finished sniffing us he trotted to it and hopped in, turning fussily before settling with a happy groan.

Karen Carrolton returned with a tray that held mugs and a coffeepot. She set it down, then pulled a creased snapshot from her fray-edged trouser pocket and held it out.

Different picture, but it was of the same woman we’d seen in the photograph from Hadlyme’s motor home. “That’s Anna. And . . . him,” she added sourly.

I took the photograph from her. It was Hadlyme, all right, younger and thinner and with a good deal more of that frizzy yellow hair than he had now, but still with a sneeringly contemptuous smile on his face, and those sharply calculating eyes.

From the way he had his hand flat against her back I couldn’t tell if he was about to embrace Anna Benoit or give her a shove. Two things were clear, though: she was very pregnant and, to judge by the look on her face, very unhappy.

“We lived in town then. In Eastport, all in the same house, me and Phyllis—that was Anna’s mother—and our other sister. Oh, I wish we’d moved out sooner, then maybe she’d have never met him.”

No grief was in her face, just an icy stillness, as if something in her had frozen when the girl died and had never thawed out.

“But how,” she asked, meeting my gaze, “did you know she was murdered? Because I said so at the time, I insisted to the police and everyone else that she must have been, but—”

“I didn’t know it,” I admitted. “I guessed. So you’d let us in.”

And so you wouldn’t shoot us. But to me it was already the only thing that made sense. Jumped off the ferry, my great-aunt Fanny.

Karen said nothing, digesting what I’d said while pouring the coffee with a steady hand.

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