Killer Crab Cakes Read online

  It was a feeling Phyllis knew all too well. During that interval after Kenny had died, before she opened the big old house in Weatherford to other retired teachers, she had thought she might go mad knocking around by herself in the empty home.

  “Anyway,” Darcy went on, “the reason I came over, other than to be neighborly and introduce myself—”

  “Was to find out what happened this morning,” Phyllis finished for her. She saw the slightly startled look on Darcy’s face and hurried on. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have interrupted you that way. It was rude of me. And after all those years I got on to my students for interrupting one another.”

  “You’re a teacher?”

  “I was. Eighth-grade history. But I’m retired now.”

  Darcy seemed to accept Phyllis’s apology. “I admit, I’m curious about what happened. I know the ambulance came and took someone away, and I heard that a man who was staying here had died.”

  Phyllis nodded. “Mr. McKenna. He had a heart attack while he was out on the pier fishing.” She didn’t go into detail about how Ed McKenna had fallen into the water and Sam had hauled him out.

  “How terrible!” Darcy said. “That poor man.”

  “Yes, it’s a tragedy,” Phyllis agreed.

  “Did he have family here with him?”

  Phyllis shook her head. “No, he was alone.”

  But he had to have family somewhere, she thought, and that reminded her of the fact that they would need to be notified of his death. Surely the police would handle that, though. That wasn’t something she should have to deal with … she hoped.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “I don’t know what it would be,” Phyllis said. “Once I’ve found out about Mr. McKenna’s next of kin, I suppose I’ll have to gather his belongings and send them. But other than that, I don’t think there’s anything else I’ll need to do.”

  Before she could say anything else, she heard the back door open and close, and then Consuela’s voice sounded in the kitchen, talking to Carolyn.

  Darcy got to her feet quickly and said, “I’d better be going. It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Newsom.”

  “Please, call me Phyllis.”

  “And I’m sorry about what happened. It must have been terrible for you.”

  Much worse for Ed McKenna, Phyllis thought, but she kept that to herself. She had already been rude to Darcy once—although that hadn’t been her intention—and she didn’t want to do it again.

  She showed Darcy out, lifting a hand in farewell as the woman walked down the steps. Then she turned and went back along the hall to the kitchen.

  Consuela was putting away the groceries she had brought back from Wal-Mart. Carolyn wasn’t in the kitchen now, and Phyllis supposed she must have gone up the rear stairs just off the pantry.

  “Mrs. Wilbarger said somebody was here,” Consuela said.

  “Yes, Darcy Maxwell from next door.”

  Consuela made a face. “Her.”

  “You don’t like her?” Phyllis asked with a frown. “She seemed nice enough, and she spoke very highly of you.”

  Consuela shrugged and said, “She’s all right, I guess. She’s just the biggest gossip between here and Corpus Christi. She offered me a job once, and when I turned her down she spread some nasty stories about my girls.” Consuela’s expression hardened. “You could say I don’t like her, all right. I’m glad she’s not gonna be next door much longer.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, she and her husband sold their house. That’s what I heard, anyway. They said it was too big for them with their kids gone. I don’t know when they’re supposed to move out, but it probably won’t be much longer … I hope.”

  “Well, maybe whoever bought the place will be better neighbors.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  The conversation had roused Phyllis’s curiosity. She asked, “What about the house on the other side? I don’t recall seeing anybody over there since we’ve been here.”

  “That’s because it’s vacant. The couple who owned it died in a car wreck about six months ago.”

  “How awful.”

  “Yeah, and they were pretty good friends with Dorothy and Ben, too. A real shame.”

  “You don’t think about bad things happening in a place as pretty as this,” Phyllis mused. “But I’m sure they do, just like they happen everywhere else.”

  “Yeah, you can’t get away from trouble. It follows people wherever they go.” Consuela’s mouth twisted in a little quirk as she spoke, and the words had a slightly bitter tone to them. She sounded like she had been followed by trouble of her own, Phyllis thought, and plenty of it. She didn’t recall Dorothy ever saying anything about that, though, and she certainly wasn’t going to pry. Whatever went on in Consuela’s personal life was private and none of Phyllis’s business.

  “Well, there ought to be places that are immune to trouble and pain,” she said.

  “There’s one,” Consuela said. She made the sign of the cross. “And poor Mr. McKenna’s gone there now.”

  Chapter 4

  Not surprisingly, a reporter from the local newspaper showed up before noon. Chief Clifton hadn’t said anything about not talking to the press, so Phyllis ushered the woman into the parlor intending to answer all her questions. Sam had just gotten back from fishing, so he spoke to the reporter, too, telling her with a rather sheepish look on his face about slapping Ed McKenna on the shoulder just before the man fell forward into the water.

  “Do you feel like you had anything to do with Mr. McKenna’s death because of that?” the woman asked.

  Phyllis responded before Sam could say anything. “He most certainly did not! Sam was just being friendly. He didn’t push Mr. McKenna or anything like that. Anyway, I’m convinced that Mr. McKenna was already dead when Sam and I walked out on the pier.”

  “Isn’t that up to the medical examiner to determine?”

  “Sure it is,” Sam said quickly, and Phyllis wondered if he had noticed that she was about to lose her patience with the reporter. It would be just like Sam to try to smooth things over, even if the woman was asking ridiculous questions. “We’ll just wait and let the proper authorities do their jobs.”

  “Have you retained a lawyer?”

  “Don’t need one,” Sam replied as he shot a glance in Phyllis’s direction. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “He certainly hasn’t,” Phyllis said.

  “Just a couple more questions …”

  Phyllis felt like telling the reporter what she could do with her questions, but she reminded herself that Dorothy and Ben still had to live here and run a business here. She didn’t want to do anything that would create enemies for them.

  So somehow she managed to put a smile on her face and said, “Of course.”

  “This isn’t the first suspicious death you’ve been involved with, is it, Mrs. Newsom?”

  The question took Phyllis by surprise, and now it was Sam’s turn to begin getting annoyed by the reporter.

  “How’d you know about that?” he asked.

  “They have this thing called the Internet.” The woman gave him an insufferably smug smile, then turned to Phyllis again. “I Googled you, Mrs. Newsom.”

  Phyllis never had gotten used to the sound of that expression.

  “I found out that you’ve stumbled over dead bodies on several occasions besides this one. You’ve even been given credit by the authorities for solving some murders.”

  There was no point in denying anything, Phyllis told herself, especially in this day and age when practically everything about a person’s life was out there on the Internet for anyone to see. She said, “I’m sure you’ve read the stories from the Weatherford and Fort Worth newspapers. You know what happened at the Peach Festival.”

  “And the school carnival and the Christmas party. It’s almost like you’re some sort of jinx, Mrs. Newsom.”

  Sam said, “That’s just crazy. I was at those p
laces, too, and so were a bunch of other people. Phyllis didn’t have anything to do with those folks gettin’ killed, and if it hadn’t been for her, the cops might not’ve ever figured out who did kill them!”

  She wished he hadn’t said that. She had never tried to imply that she had solved those murders when the police couldn’t. She couldn’t blame him for being upset with the pushy reporter, though. She wasn’t too happy with the woman herself.

  “There’s really no need to go into all of this,” Phyllis said. “Mr. McKenna wasn’t murdered. I’m sure the medical examiner will confirm that he died of natural causes. It’s an unfortunate situation—”

  “Especially for Mr. McKenna,” the reporter put in.

  “But it’s nothing like those other times,” Phyllis went on determinedly. “Now, if you have all you need …”

  The woman shrugged. “For now.” She didn’t protest as Phyllis led her to the front door and closed it behind her … maybe, just maybe, a little harder than was absolutely necessary.

  When she came back to the parlor, Sam was shaking his head. “I reckon we shouldn’t get too upset with the lady,” he said. “I don’t imagine it’s every day that a fella drops dead on a fishin’ pier around here.”

  “I suppose not.” Phyllis paused. “Thank you for defending me.”

  “Hey, you were stickin’ up for me, too.” He grinned. “We make a pretty good team.”

  “I think so,” Phyllis agreed. She sighed. “I have to get back to thinking about my entry for the contest. It’s only a few days away, you know.”

  “I know. I’m not likely to forget a dessert contest. Accordin’ to the paper, they’re having a gumbo cook-off, too. And funnel cakes.” He licked his lips in anticipation and looked so gleeful that Phyllis had to laugh.

  “I know, you’re going to spend all weekend gorging yourself.”

  “Maybe not the whole weekend …”

  When Consuela had finished cleaning up after lunch, Phyllis found herself in the kitchen pondering her choices for the competition. Cookies, cakes, or pies? Or something a little more unusual? As far as she could see, there wasn’t any way to make her entry relate to the coast. A pie was a pie was a pie, no matter where it was baked. And while, say, peaches adapted well to baked goods, nothing about the sea did. You couldn’t make crab cookies!

  And a crab cake wasn’t the sort of cake you entered in a dessert competition, either, she told herself, although she loved a good crab cake. Consuela had made some for supper the night before, in fact, that had been delicious. Maybe, Phyllis mused, she could make a different sort of crab cake: a cake decorated with crabs made out of frosting …

  The sound of the doorbell drove those thoughts out of her head. Consuela and her daughters had gone home for the afternoon. Consuela would return to prepare supper, but the younger women were finished with their cleaning for the day. The Forrests and the Blaines were out somewhere; Nick and Kate were upstairs “napping”—and maybe they really were, Phyllis told herself; and Eve and Carolyn had gone to check out some of the art galleries, dragging Sam along with them.

  At one time, given the romantic interest that Eve had shown in Sam for months after he moved into the house in Weatherford, Phyllis might not have been too comfortable about letting them wander around art galleries together. But since the past Christmas, when she and Sam had finally admitted the attraction they felt toward each other, Eve had backed off and started treating him as a friend, rather than a potential husband number four … or was it five?

  “You’ll enjoy it, dear,” Eve had told him as she patted his grizzled cheek. “I’m sure at least one place will have paintings of John Wayne and Elvis on black velvet.”

  “I can’t wait,” Sam had said with mock enthusiasm.

  That left Phyllis to answer the door again. She hoped that this time it wouldn’t be someone as annoying as that reporter had been.

  There wasn’t one person waiting on the porch; there were three: two men and one woman. All of them were in their forties, and Phyllis was surprised to see that the two men were twins, short, stocky men with sharp faces and sleek dark hair. She wasn’t sure why them being twins surprised her. She’d had numerous pairs of twins in her classes, and they had to grow up into adults.

  The woman had dark hair, too, and she looked enough like the two men for Phyllis to realize that they were all siblings. Not triplets, though. The woman appeared to be several years older.

  “We’re looking for Phyllis Newsom,” she said.

  “I’m Mrs. Newsom,” Phyllis told them. “Can I help you?”

  “My name is Frances Heaton,” the woman said. “I’m Edward McKenna’s daughter.”

  “Oh, Ms. Heaton, I’m so sorry about what happened—”

  “These are my brothers, Oscar and Oliver McKenna.” Frances Heaton’s voice was brusque and businesslike as she broke in on Phyllis’s attempt to convey her sympathy.

  Phyllis nodded politely anyway as she said, “I’m pleased to meet all of you. I just wish it were under better circumstances.”

  As she spoke she was thinking that Oscar and Oliver had probably been teased unmercifully about their names and about being twins when they were growing up. Both of them had that long-suffering look.

  “Please come in,” Phyllis went on as she stepped back, holding the door. She motioned for the visitors to enter the foyer. When they had done so, she closed the front door and led them into the parlor. “Have a seat. Can I get you anything? Something to drink?”

  Frances Heaton shook her head as the three of them sat on the sofa, her in the middle and her brothers flanking her. “We’re here to collect our father’s things.”

  “Of course. I really am sorry. I suppose the police notified you?”

  “That’s right. We drove down from San Antonio right away.”

  They must have left immediately after the phone call bearing the bad news, Phyllis thought. There had been time for them to make the drive from San Antonio, but just barely.

  She felt like she ought to say something else. “I didn’t know your father for very long, but he seemed like a very nice man—”

  “He was an idiot,” one of the brothers said.

  “He would have to be to trust you to run the company,” the other brother said.

  “Stop it,” Frances said. “He never should have put either one of you in charge, and you know it.”

  Phyllis sat there during the sharp exchange, trying not to look flabbergasted. Obviously, the McKenna siblings didn’t get along well, and they didn’t bother hiding it even in the presence of strangers, when most people would at least try to put up a facade of cordiality. The resentment and dislike between them had to run pretty deep, and from the sound of it they hadn’t cared all that much for their father, either.

  Frances turned her attention back to Phyllis. “Have you already gathered my father’s belongings?”

  Before Phyllis could answer, the brother on Frances’s left said, “He was our father, too, you know.”

  “You always say my father, like he wasn’t even related to us,” the other brother said.

  Frances made a noise that was halfway between a laugh and an angry grunt. “Sometimes I wonder,” she said.

  “That’s a terrible thing to say!”

  “Can’t you at least be civil, at a time like this?”

  The three of them sat there glaring at one another, with Frances’s head swiveling back and forth like she was watching a tennis match … a tennis match she found very annoying.

  Their bickering made Phyllis uncomfortable. She didn’t like it when families fought, and the hostility among these three was evidently of long standing. She started to get to her feet, saying, “I’ll go get Mr. McKenna’s things together—”

  “Before you do,” one of the brothers said, causing Phyllis to sink back into the armchair where she’d been sitting, “I for one would like to hear exactly what happened. All the chief of police said when he reached me at the office was that
my father had passed away unexpectedly.”

  “Now who’s calling him my father?” Frances asked.

  “It’s just a figure of speech.”

  “So it’s all right for you but not for me?”

  Phyllis fought down the impulse to tell all three of them to behave—and to use her teacher voice to do it, too. Instead, hoping that they would stop arguing if she told them what they wanted to know, she said, “It appears that your father had a heart attack, or possibly a stroke, while he was fishing out on the pier early this morning.”

  “Who found him?” Frances asked.

  For once her brothers kept quiet and allowed Phyllis to answer the question. “My friend Mr. Fletcher and I were the ones who discovered that Mr. McKenna had passed away. We were walking out to the end of the pier, and as we passed your father, he fell into the water.”

  “You mean he had the heart attack at that exact moment?” asked either Oscar or Oliver. Phyllis wondered if there was any easy way to tell them apart. She had seldom seen twins so identical.

  “Well, no,” she admitted in answer to the question. “He must have … died … a few minutes earlier. We didn’t realize that until Mr. Fletcher slapped him on the shoulder … you know, just a friendly greeting from one fisherman to another … and Mr. McKenna sort of … toppled over.”

  “My God!” the other brother said. “You mean this guy Fletcher knocked Dad into the water?”

  “It was an accident,” Phyllis said, “and it didn’t really make any difference because I’m sure your father had already passed away—”

  “You can’t know that,” Frances said, suddenly leaning forward like a hound scenting something interesting. “For all we know, the two of you contributed to his death.”

  “Sounds to me like negligence,” the brother on her right said.

  “And a wrongful-death suit,” the brother on Frances’s left said.

  That was all Phyllis could stand. Without even realizing how she had gotten there, she found herself on her feet, and as she glared at the visitors, she said, “Good heavens, what’s wrong with you people? Your father just died, and all you can do is snipe at one another and threaten innocent people with lawsuits?”