Town in a Lobster Stew

probably guess. She said I had to pay her back in installments, which I agreed to do. For the last few days she barely spoke to me. She seemed to forget I was alive.”

“Did you talk to her or see her at all yesterday? The police think she was killed sometime last night.”

At that question, Bob scrunched up his face. “The police were out here earlier today, asking me the same thing. She was here in the afternoon, but she left in a rush. I had the feeling she was meeting someone.”

“Did you tell the police that?”

Bob nodded. “Sure did. I also told them that she’d been pretty upset ever since the cook-off. She wanted to win that thing pretty bad. But I got the feeling there was something else going on. She became very secretive. I thought she was up to something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know for sure.” Bob pointed at the ledger sitting on his desk. “But I think it had something to do with that.”

“The ledger?”

Bob nodded. “I saw her reading it a few days ago in her office, but I didn’t know what it was back then. I just thought it was something she’d picked up in the archives. I didn’t realize it belonged to Old Man Sedley.”

Candy eyed the ledger. On an impulse, she crossed to it and picked it up. She opened the cover and glanced at its first few pages. “Maybe there’s something else in here we’ve been missing. Maybe...”

But she never had a chance to finish.

A figure had appeared suddenly out of the fog and now stood silhouetted in the doorway.

“I’ll take that,” the figure said, motioning toward Candy and the ledger.

Her head twisted toward the door.

It was Roger Sykes.

And he was holding a gun, leveled right at her heart.

Thirty-Nine

“I see you’ve found it. I’d wondered where she put it. The silly woman was trying to hide it from me.”

His voice was surprisingly calm as he took a few steps into the shed. The fog seemed to cling to him, as if reluctant to let him escape its grasp. He wore a black jacket, gray shirt, and dark slacks. He also wore gloves, Candy noticed.

“Why don’t you set that ledger right back down on the desk,” Roger instructed her, “and step away from it.” He swung the gun toward Bob. “Both of you. Back over that way.” He motioned toward the workbench.

When they both hesitated, stunned by his sudden appearance, his face abruptly turned dark and his eyes lashed out at them, full of ferocity. “Now!” he shouted, jabbing at them with the gun. They both jumped. Bob sprang out of his chair as if bitten by a spider, and Candy quickly shuffled sideways, dropped the ledger on the desk as Roger had instructed, and moved away.

Side by side, she and Bob backed up, toward the side workbench. Both of them held their hands up in the air, even though Roger hadn’t asked them to. It seemed appropriate, and was more instinct than anything, especially when facing down the barrel of the metal gray pistol he held. They were both too shocked to speak.

Roger’s face had returned to its previous calm state, his sudden burst of anger gone as quickly as it had appeared. His eyes, though, were bright and glassy, with thin pinpricks of light shining out, as if lit from within. When he was satisfied they were a safe distance away, he strode purposefully across the shed, keeping the gun loosely pointed in their direction. He stopped in front of the desk, let out a visible sound of relief, and slowly reached out toward the ledger, as if it were some great talisman he had found only after a long, arduous quest.

“So here it is at last,” he said, taking it in a gloved hand. He studied its cover, then used his thumb to flip it open and read the first page. Satisfied, he closed it again and turned toward Candy and Bob.

“I’m sorry to put you though all this,” he said, sounding genuinely concerned. “It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult. It was a simple arrangement. I paid Charlotte — ”

“You paid Charlotte?” Candy cut in.

Roger looked slightly annoyed at the interruption. His mouth twitched at the edges. “As I said, we had an arrangement. She would acquire the ledger, she would take that recipe she wanted, and then I would get the ledger, with everything else in it.”

“Why, Roger?” Candy asked, her curiosity getting the better of her. “What’s in that ledger that makes it so important?”

“Information,” he said after considering her question for a few moments. “Valuable information.”

“And that made it worth everything you’ve done — including murder?”

He gave her a hard look.

When he didn’t answer, she went on. “You killed Charlotte, didn’t you?”

In response, he reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled something out, glanced at it, and tossed it toward Bob. It hit the maintenance man in the chest. He flinched and fumbled for it but couldn’t grab hold of it, and it clattered to the floor between Bob and Candy.

It was a roll of dark green fishing line.

“Does that answer your question? I borrowed that from your boyfriend,” Roger said to Candy, allowing a trace of mockery to enter his voice. “Ben’s a very trusting fellow, you know — and not as observant as you’d expect for a newspaper man. He never noticed it was missing from his tackle box. Of course, he’s had other things on his mind this weekend — like that old man’s murder... and, of course, you.”

“What?” Candy wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly.

Roger almost laughed at her expression. “You heard me right. He likes you a lot, you know. He talks about you all the time — even when everyone else around him gets tired of hearing about you. But at least it was a way for me to keep up with what you’ve been doing around town the past few days. You’ve been quite active, I’ve heard. Interviewing that old woman. Searching for her recipe. Judging the cook-off with me. Finding the body. Getting that promotion — oh yes, I heard about that too. Ben has been a perfect gentleman at spilling all the secrets about your investigation. Of course, he had no idea what he was doing — or who he was spilling his secrets to,” Roger added with a slight grin.

Candy gasped, suddenly angry. “You’ve been using him.”

“And setting him up,” Bob added, looking down at the fishing line.

“Of course I have.” Roger flashed his white teeth as his grin grew. “What are friends for?”

Candy couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You betrayed him? But I thought — ”

“What, that we were friends? That’s what he thinks. But we never were. He was a family friend of sorts, and I met him a few times in college. The rest is a fabrication I’ve nurtured over the years, hoping I could tap into it someday. And it looks like today is the day.”

“But why kill Charlotte?” Candy asked. “What did she ever do to you?”

Roger’s face turned dark again. “She went back on our deal, that’s why.”

“Because she realized you betrayed her too?”

Roger glared at her. “You’re smarter than you look. How did you figure that out?”

“Something Oliver told me earlier today. He said Charlotte was furious with him when she didn’t win the cook-off, and confronted him. She kept saying, He promised, he promised. She was referring to you, wasn’t she? You promised her she’d win that contest — and then you went back on your deal. You made sure she lost, even though she was using Mr. Sedley’s recipe.”

At that, Roger chuckled. “Well, yes, it’s true. I thought it’d be fun to play with her a little. You know the old saying: you can’t always get what you want.”

“You purposely dismissed that recipe — and you placed that bowl of stew in front of Wilma Mae too, didn’t you? Because you wanted to get rid of her. You didn’t want her campaigning for Mr. Sedley’s stew.”

“I admit, it was a last-minute decision,” Roger said. “I didn’t completely know what I’d be facing until I arrived at the inn that morning. But it seemed a little too troubling to have Charlotte using that old man’s recipe,