Encounters and Enemies by Diana Xarissa

Author:Diana Xarissa [Xarissa, Diana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-11-16T22:00:00+00:00

9

“Hello?”

“Fenella, are you okay?” Daniel asked.

“I’m fine,” she replied, settling back on the couch and switching the phone to speaker mode. That way, Mona could hear the conversation, too.

“Mark said that two different people with plans to visit you have died in the past three days.”

“That’s about right,” Fenella said with a sigh. “Although I didn’t know the first woman was planning to visit me. She didn’t tell me she was coming.”

“If there was any way I could, I’d come back for the weekend.” Daniel sounded frustrated. “But we’re all going to Edinburgh this weekend to tour some of their crime lab facilities. I can’t get away.”

“It’s fine. Really it is,” Fenella said, working hard to sound like she meant it. “Inspector Hammersmith is sure that both deaths were accidents and that my involvement is purely coincidental.”

Daniel sighed. “Would you mind starting at the beginning? Pretend I know nothing and walk me through everything that’s happened in the past week or so.”

“I’ll start with last Saturday evening,” Fenella said. “That’s where I met Anne Marie Smathers.” Feeling very conscious that she hadn’t given Mark the same full accounting of her conversation with the dead woman, Fenella started slowly.

“I’ll start when we arrived at the party, and tell you everything that I can remember,” she said. She wanted to tell him about her conversation with Phillipa Clucas, but she didn’t want to make it obvious that she thought it might be relevant. By the time she’d finished recounting her evening at the charity auction, she needed a drink.

“When you spoke to Mrs. Smathers, did you get the feeling that she was planning on seeing you again?” Daniel asked as Fenella filled a glass from her tap.

“No, not at all. I didn’t like the woman. If I’d thought she was planning to see me again, I probably would have tried to discourage her.”

“So what happened next?”

Fenella told him all about tea the next day with Paulette and Paul, and then hearing the news that Anne Marie had died. “Someone told me that the car she was driving was the same model as the one that her husband crashed sixty years ago,” she added.

“Yes, apparently she enjoyed driving it but didn’t use it very often. As I understand it, she took very good care of it and only drove it on special occasions.”

“It seems macabre, having the same car as the one that crashed and killed your husband,” Fenella said.

“People are odd,” Daniel said.

Fenella chuckled. “They are, at that.”

“So what happened next? How did you happen to make plans to see Mrs. Dolek?”

“I met her at the Tynwald Day fair,” Fenella explained.

“I was sorry to miss that. Maybe we can go together next year and you can explain everything to me.”

“I’d like that.” Fenella frowned at Mona, who’d made a face. Mona was always telling her to keep the men in her life guessing as to how she felt, but Fenella wasn’t good at playing those kinds of games. She really liked Daniel,

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