Rivers and Creaks: A Redwoods Country Mystery (Book 1) by Marc Jedel

Author:Marc Jedel [Jedel, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BGM Press
Published: 2023-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

*****

I left a bag with a dozen bagels and cream cheese in the Quilt House’s kitchen for the guests. Maybe it wasn’t quite as over-the-top as Juliet serving quiche and waffles on the same morning, but I had gone all out and purchased two different kinds of cream cheese. Two. Let see those buggers try to complain.

The guests weren’t stirring yet, which was a good thing as it kept my aggravation to the minimum. I decided to set up the folding chairs in the backyard. It had to be done before the wedding this afternoon.

Fifi was safely ensconced in the cottage. Charlie had impressed me with her professional plumber’s attitude by arriving early to finish the job. I had told her I was leaving Fifi in the cottage so she’d get used to her new home, but the real reason was I hadn’t wanted Fifi to hurt herself on the stairs or get herself lost somewhere in the huge inn building. This whole move had been quite traumatic for that little one.

Carrying the chairs out from the lean-to shed against the back of the inn and setting them up left me with plenty of spare brain cells to consider my next steps on this case.

Brad had fingered two suspects last night: Carl and Sophia. Carl, her boyfriend, was the one I really wanted to talk to, what with his land purchase and planned construction of a salsa factory with store. Big plans submitted by him and Katie, followed by an argument at dinner shortly before she turned up dead. I didn’t need to be any sort of brilliant detective to recognize those red flags.

Since Carl hadn’t returned to spend the night here, it made asking him some questions casually while he ate breakfast a nonstarter. With everyone in the building, snooping in the bedroom he had shared was a no go too. I expected he’d turn up for the wedding, even if only briefly, since he had no reason to believe he was under suspicion. Acting suspicious could lead to people asking him uncomfortable questions, so he’d likely pretend that everything was normal—at least as normal as possible with your girlfriend murdered.

Attempting to break him under intense interrogation wasn’t exactly an option for me. Besides being illegal for a private citizen and too difficult for me to pull off at my age, that sort of thing only worked in bad stories or shows. I’d have to employ charm. Wrinkling my nose at the thought, I realized that was probably just as unlikely for me to achieve. So I’d have to trick him into confessing, perhaps with some subtle questions. This would take more thought.

Bending over, I picked up trash left outside by the guests, a few bottles, a key, and even a single shoe. Slobs. The shoe went on the back porch where the owner would see it later, the key into a vest pocket, and the bottles into a recycle bin by the back door. My backyard was not a trash heap, and I wasn’t running a lost and found.

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