Page 10 of Dead & Breakfast
“She has feminine energy.”
“What does that even mean?” Arthur felt something hysterical welling up inside him that probably had much more to do with the dead body in their garden than naming a cat—though the traumatic experience of watchingCatsthe musical in theaters a few years ago was certainly grounds for it.
Salvatore caught his eye and gazed pleadingly at him.
“Fine, we can keep her,” Arthur promised, against his better judgment. He might have put up more of a fight if not for the distraction of a very real corpse in the shrubbery. “As long as she keeps her paws off the evidence.”
Arthur led Sal a few paces away, eyes lingering on the mayor. This was the first time he’d seen a dead body in person, outside of funerals and his general day-to-day life living in one himself, of course, but he knew all about solving murders. “I’ll make some notes, put together thoughts that might be helpful to the police.”
Pulling the notebook he kept for just such occasions out of his breast pocket, Arthur jotted down details of the scene, but his thoughts kept snagging on why the mayor was here when he hadn’t shown up last evening for the gathering.
Logic led Arthur in a circle. If the mayor was here, in their garden, then he must have come here at some late hour. But why? To speak with Nora? No, surely the mayor wouldn’t bother her so late at night. So, then, to spy on Arthur and Sal, perhaps? Arthur wouldn’t put it past George Roth to use underhanded means to get dirt on the only vampires in town. The irony, of course, being that it was Mayor Roth who had dirt on him now—harvest supreme potting mix, to be exact.
Arthur sighed heavily. All this stank of foul play. “Don’t supposehe was murdered, do you?” he said quietly into Sal’s ear so Nora wouldn’t hear.
“If he was, the list of possible culprits will be a mile long.” There was an edge to Sal’s voice. “Whowouldn’twant to kill him?”
“Keep your voice down.” Arthur glanced around, but Nora had her phone pressed to her ear and there was no one but the cat to hear for a solid mile on every side. Still, Arthur couldn’t shake the worry that had sown itself along his shoulder blades.Someonehad been to the Iris Inn uninvited that night, and they could still be lurking nearby.
The alternative was unthinkable. Arthur glanced at Nora, Rumble, and Sal in turn.
Almostunthinkable.
Sheriff McMartin wasbroad and unnaturally tan, with the bleached-blond hair and chiseled jaw of a Hollywood leading man gone sour. He wore his brown uniform like a costume and brandished his smile like a nightstick.
Arthur eyed the gun at McMartin’s side warily. He was all for democracy, but the ballot choices in Trident Falls left something to be desired. McMartin belonged to one of the oldest families in town, so his popularity guaranteed him his position year after year. His brief stint on the silver screen didn’t hurt either. Though his role in the nineties action franchiseBullet Pointwas cut short by an offscreen character death between the first and second installments, the memory of Officer Splice, a copy editor turned policeman, lived on in his everyday performance of the real deal.
“What seems to be the problem here?” Sheriff McMartin said as he approached.
Arthur cleared his throat and flipped open his little black bookof notes. Time to show this buttermilk Nathan Fillion what a real detective could do.
Salvatore beat him to the punch. “The problem is the dead man in our flower bed.”
“It’s Mayor George Roth,” Nora added. “We came out here earlier to tour the garden, and—”
McMartin cut her off. “That’s the mayor, all right. What was he doing here?” He turned to Arthur and Salvatore, eyes lingering unkindly on Arthur’s admittedly loud paisley umbrella.
“Do I look like a medium to you?” Salvatore asked. “He’s dead. How are we possibly to know why he decided to take a walk in our begonias before expiring?”
Arthur cleared his throat, the gesture as pointed as his fangs. “What my husband means to say is, we don’t know why he was in the garden. He was given a personal invitation to wine and cheese night yesterday evening, but he didn’t show up.” He glanced at his notes. “There was a stray cat here this morning, which is suspicious—”
“How dare you call Rumble suspicious!”
“I meant the cat’s sudden arrival was unusual.” Arthur gave Salvatore a broiling look. “And it could be linked to George Roth’s death.”
McMartin stomped around the body, stepping on a few of the surviving begonias. Salvatore whimpered quietly with each flower’s demise. Finally, McMartin crouched next to Roth’s lifeless body and felt the corpse’s neck for a pulse.
“He’s ice-cold, definitely dead,” McMartin said, flinching back from the body.
Arthur thought he’d taken an awfully long time to come to that conclusion, but kept it to himself.
“Do you need our statements—?” Nora began, but once againthe sheriff cut her off as he radioed for the coroner and a few deputies as backup.
The sun had risen enough to make Arthur adjust the angle of his umbrella. Now wasn’t the time for a daytime energy crash.
All around them, the birds sang as though they were afraid one might forget it was spring, and a few bees flitted between the undisturbed flower beds. If not for the body in the begonias, it would appear as though nothing was amiss, like Arthur and Salvatore’s budding dream of a quiet retirement wasn’t in jeopardy.
“I’ll take your statements now,” the sheriff said, adjusting his belt and puffing out his chest. He turned to Nora, acknowledging her existence for the first time. “Is your husband inside?”
