Page 72 of Dead & Breakfast
“Well, I think you’ve got a lot of your facts wrong, so maybe start there.” Quinn made to step around the table toward the door.
“Like what?” Arthur asked, desperate to keep her talking.
Quinn fixed him with an expression of pity. “You really think Brody didn’t break into my office? It was obviously him.”
“It wasn’t.” Arthur stood as well, meeting her at the head of the table. “Unless Brody Young can be in two places at once.”
“What do you mean?” Nora asked.
“At the time of the break-in, Brody Young was busy moving a dead body.”
Quinn blinked. “But…”
“So, Quinn was wrong,” Nora said with a little edge of satisfaction.
Quinn’s face had lost all its color. “If it wasn’t him, then I—”
Her words were cut off by an awful electronic ringtone. The phone was ringing in the kitchen, a blistering synthesized rendition of Vivaldi’sFour Seasons. Salvatore had programmed it the day they moved in, and Arthur, not for lack of trying, hadn’t been able to change it.
The song continued for a few bars before anyone moved. Arthur wanted to ignore it, eyes glued to Quinn, who was breathing likeshe’d just finished a marathon and looked almost close to fainting (for real, not one of the melodramatic swoons Sal was so fond of). But eventually decorum won over his curiosity—and it was clear she would say no more—so Arthur went to answer the phone.
Sheriff McMartin’s smug voice blared at maximum volume from the receiver, not at all the embarrassed almost starlet from the night before. “Mr.Miller? I’m going to need you and Mr.Conte to go to Young Family Dental at eleven a.m.”
“Why?” Arthur blinked.
“Because I’m the sheriff and I’m telling you to? Don’t be late.” McMartin hung up.
In a daze, Arthur returned to the dining room. “I’m afraid we’ll have to cut brunch short.” He’d barely gotten to interrogate them, and now both Nora and Quinn were tight-lipped, staring daggers at each other. There was something there, something that might be at the heart of this whole mess, but he couldn’t stay and uncover it because the sheriff was flaunting his power and bossing them around.
“Who was it?” Sal stood, clearly sensing something was wrong.
“McMartin. He wants us downtown by eleven.”
“Why downtown?”
“I don’t know, but he said to meet him at the dentist’s office. I assume it has something to do with Brody.” Arthur glanced at Nora and Quinn, who were staring at him now.
Salvatore poured himself another cup of coffee. “Tell him we can’t go out into sunlight or we’ll burst into flame. We can’t run our guests off now. Brunch has barely begun.”
“He’s seen us out during the day without any signs of spontaneous combustion, remember?”
“I refuse to remember anything while there’s uneaten bacon to be attended to.”
“It’s fine,” Nora said, voice strained. “I can stay to clean up.”
“Well, I can’t.” Without another word, Quinn was gone, practically running for the front door. Nora didn’t hang around either, hurrying for the kitchen with a stack of dishes.
Rumble prowled into the room and leaped onto Sal’s lap, probably after all the uneaten bacon.
“Ouch!” Sal yelped as her claws made contact with his thighs.
“What will the cat think if you stand up the sheriff and he’s forced to come bother us here?” Arthur tried.
Perhaps it was the possibility of being such a bad influence on Rumble that inspired Salvatore to leave the food behind and change into something respectable. More likely it was the threat of further pain, care of her murder mittens.
Brunch was quite over, but Arthur’s stomach had never felt emptier.
They reached YoungFamily Dental at five minutes before eleven. The dentist’s office was in a tidy brick building, and the parking lot was nearly empty, save for the sheriff’s car and the coroner’s van. Young’s truck was blessedly absent.
