She turned at the sound of footsteps again. Chief Daryl Durr walked out onto the porch.
He nodded at Maggie. “She’s asking for you,” he said.
Maggie put her hands on her knees and rose. “Guess I should get back. I’ll help her pack,” she said to the two of them. To Chief Durr, she added, “I’m going to take her home with me for a few days.”
“That’s a good idea. Thanks.”
He waited until Maggie had disappeared into the house, then dropped down beside Candy, sitting next to her on the porch steps. “So,” he began slowly, staring out toward the fading sun, “how come every time there’s a murder in this town, you seem to be stuck right in the middle of it?”
Candy didn’t answer. She couldn’t tell if he was joking or serious, so she thought it best not to say anything.
He leaned back, turning his head to eye her, squinting slightly as he did so. “So you want to tell me what happened?”
He waited patiently, his gaze focused on the trees over the rooftops, while Candy explained how Wilma Mae had fainted at the cook-off, and how Maggie had driven the elderly woman back to her home, and about the call from Maggie, and how she and Maggie had found the body in the basement. She stuck to the facts but left out details about the missing recipe and her suspicions about Wanda Boyle.
When she was done, Chief Durr turned his appraising gaze back toward her. “Sounds good so far. Anything else you’d like to tell me?”
Candy looked at him, giving him her best uncomprehending look. “Like what?”
He sighed. “Why do I have this strange suspicion you know more than you’re telling me — again?”
Candy gulped, but she kept her mouth shut. She wasn’t ready to say anything else — not yet, anyway.
Daryl Durr swiped at the knees of his sharply pressed khaki trousers, as if brushing away a layer of dust, and rose to his feet. He stepped down off the steps onto the pathway and turned to look her in the eye. “I would like to remind you, Ms. Holliday, that any information you have must be shared with us. Withholding information of any kind is a serious crime.”
Candy brushed absently at her hair and squinted back at him. “What makes you think I’m withholding information?”
“I’m not making any insinuations. I’m just letting you know.”
“I called the station yesterday afternoon,” Candy said, surprised to hear an edge of anger in her voice. “I told the person I talked to that Mr. Sedley was missing. I did my best to notify you and your staff yesterday that something was wrong. Oliver LaForce said he called you too.”
Chief Durr seemed taken aback by that bit of information. “The innkeeper?”
“He said he called the station this morning.”
The police chief thought about that a moment. “I don’t seem to remember hearing anything about that, but I’ll check on it when I get back to the station. Now, again, just to make my point clear. We’re the town police. You’re not. When you first suspected the body might be in the house, that’s when you should have called us.”
“I was going to, but I had to check it out first. I was just being thorough.”
The chief nodded his head. “I understand that, Ms. Holliday. And fortunately, we think we were able to get what we needed from the scene. The crime lab van from Augusta will be here shortly, and they’ll follow up. But by disturbing the body like you did, you could have destroyed crucial evidence. You need to learn to leave the detecting to the detectives. Amateur sleuthing is frowned upon in this town. Besides, I thought you learned your lesson after the last time something like this happened. You could have gotten both yourself and your friend killed. Next time, call us first.”
Feeling he had made himself perfectly clear, he nodded sharply and started up the steps, heading back into the house.
But as he passed her, Candy looked up at him. “Next time?”
The chief stopped and stared down at her for a moment. He gave her a pained smile, not completely unlike something she’d see from Doc. “Somehow I get the impression you’re not going to listen to me and that this won’t be the last time you and I meet like this. Isn’t that right, Ms. Holliday?”
Candy batted her eyes and smiled sweetly at him. “Why, Chief Durr, I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.”
Nineteen
Candy couldn’t get that thought out of her head. It was the one crucial point she kept coming back to, when everything else that had happened over the past few days still seemed fuzzy. There was so much she couldn’t figure out — and most of it had to do with Wanda.
Had she really cooked the stew with the cinnamon in it, as the list on Robbie’s clipboard seemed to indicate? And if she had, did that mean she’d also stolen the recipe from Wilma Mae’s house?
Did it mean — and this was the point that kept sticking in Candy’s mind — Wanda murdered Mr. Sedley?
Or did the black
And maybe she
Candy knew that was why she’d kept certain bits of information to herself yesterday when she talked to Chief Durr on the front porch steps of Wilma Mae’s house. She worried about it afterwards, wondering if she’d done the right thing. But after thinking it through, she was convinced she had. She didn’t have a firm enough grasp on all the facts yet, and she didn’t want to go around incriminating folks in town — even Wanda Boyle — if she didn’t know the truth herself.
But who had it been? That was the most confusing part. Candy could think of a bunch of people who might have wanted that recipe, starting with the eleven cook-off contestants. Certainly someone like Burt Ramsay would have coveted the recipe for his business. The same could be said for Melody Barnes. And what about Juanita? Candy recalled Wilma Mae telling her that, years ago, Mr. Duffy, who ran the diner back then, had offered to buy the recipe from Mr. Sedley. Juanita had worked at the diner for years. Could she be mixed up in the recipe’s theft?
But it didn’t make any sense. The cinnamon-flavored recipe had been at the top of Candy’s list, but not Roger’s. Juanita had won with a different recipe.
No matter how hard she tried, Candy couldn’t get that thought out of her head.
It was Sunday morning, and Candy was working in the vegetable garden with Doc, planting carrots, cucumber, pumpkin, squash, and sunflower seeds, and putting in green pepper and tomato plants she’d bought at Hatch’s Garden Center and Farm Stand a few miles up the Coastal Loop. After the wet spring, the soil in the garden was moist and rich underneath and slightly dry on top. They’d been putting compost, straw, and even grass clippings on the garden patches for years to build up the nutrients. The dirt dug easily with a shovel now, airy and as dark as used coffee grinds — which Candy admitted she also occasionally threw on the garden, though she knew they worked better if she tossed them into the composter along with eggshells, potato skins, and other kitchen detritus.
They got most of the seeds and all of the plants in before they decided to take a break late in the morning. Doc’s leg was acting up again, and he was complaining about his back as well. He wore a white cotton shirt, opened several buttons at the neck, and beat-up khaki pants he used only for gardening and working in the fields — and occasionally for running to the hardware store. They were torn at the knees and threadbare in the rear, and the shirt was as thin as onion skin at the elbows, but he refused to toss the old clothes out. “They’ve still got plenty of good years in them,” he told her when she pointed out his sartorial shortcomings.
He also wore a floppy Australian-style hat, aviator-style sunglasses, and his scuffed Timberland boots, which he’d had for as long as she could remember. Add a pipe, Candy thought, and he might have looked like some
