Carried to the Grave and Other Stories by Leslie Budewitz

Author:Leslie Budewitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: small town, amateur sleuth, cooking, montana, women sleuths, cat mystery, culinary mystery, foodies, vacation destination, food and wine
Publisher: Beyond the Page Publishing

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With Emily in the passenger seat, I zipped up Back to Front, then zigged and zagged out of the village. Wound my way past the small, older homes clustered at the top of the hill and through a newer residential district to the dorm where the theater’s summer hires bunk.

Emily’s hands trembled as she unlocked the dormitory’s front door. The smell of microwave popcorn hit my nose. A bass rhythm thumped in the distance.

“Upstairs,” she said. “Second floor, second room on the right.”

The room with the open door. Where one bed had been stripped, half the drawers emptied, and one side of the small closet cleaned out, except for one last cardboard box.

“Did she sleep here last night?” I asked.

“No. I thought she was with Braden. Guys are on the third floor. We’re not supposed to, but . . .” Emily made a “what can you do?” gesture. “She must have packed up this morning, when she knew I’d be at work.”

So Bianca didn’t want Emily to know she was leaving. Why?

We reached the same conclusion at the same time. I opened the medicine cabinet above the sink. Also half empty. No prescription bottles.

Emily was rummaging through a zippered canvas duffle. “It’s gone,” she said. “The chloral hydrate.”

I sat on the edge of the bed and gestured for her to join me. “Tell me exactly what you did Friday. How you got the drug into Chad’s drink.”

“That was easy. I’m the last person on from stage left, from the green room, so I poured a little into his can, then slipped it back in my bag. We’re not supposed to bring anything but scripts and water bottles into the green room, so I opened the outside door and left my bag behind one of the shrubs in the alley. No one knew.”

“Except Bianca and Braden.” Everybody knew the actors often propped open the door, to let their friends from town sneak in for a show, or to pop in and out without making any noise.

She pressed her lips together and nodded.

I frowned. “So after the deputies let you change back into street clothes, you ducked down the alley and grabbed your bag.”

“And I never checked. But the bottle’s gone.”

Which meant the other two had feared getting caught more than Emily did. Even though it was her mother’s name on the prescription and the bottle had been in her bag.

Footsteps pounded down the hallway. I had expected Bello and his deputies to be quieter.

But it wasn’t them. It was Bianca. She grabbed the doorframe and skidded to a stop when she saw us.

“Aren’t you—weren’t you supposed to be at work?”

Emily roared back, like the cat she’d played on stage, “You were just going to leave? Go back to Indiana without saying a word?”

“I—we didn’t know what to do.” More footsteps. A male voice called out, “Bianca, hurry up. Grab the box so we can leave.”

Then Braden came up behind Bianca. He might have been a chorus cat, but with his boyish

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