Killer Crab Cakes by Livia J. Washburn Read Free Book Online Page B

drawers. Fishing outfits, Phyllis thought. McKenna hadn’t needed anything else because he didn’t do anything else while he was here.
    He hadn’t been a poor man, though. He could afford to stay at the bed-and-breakfast when there were cheaper places in Rockport and Fulton, and even though Phyllis didn’t know much about fishing gear, she thought the half-dozen rods and reels leaning in a corner looked expensive. Sitting on the dresser was a spare tackle box fully loaded with what appeared to be every variety of lure and hook ever made. A single-minded man, she thought. She had no idea what Ed McKenna had done the rest of the year—although the comments made by his children told Phyllis that he had owned some sort of company—but when he came to the coast he had only one thing in mind, only one goal: to fish as much as he could while he was here.
    She put the suitcase on the bed and opened it, then gathered the clothes and placed them inside the suitcase. She would take it and the tackle box downstairs first, then return for the rods and reels. She wondered briefly what had happened to the gear Mr. McKenna had carried with him out onto the pier this morning. Maybe the police had taken it, she thought. That was none of her business, though, and it would be up to McKenna’s children to recover it if they wanted it.
    She closed the suitcase and fastened the latches, then picked it up and hefted the tackle box in her other hand. As she left the room and went out into the hallway, she heard voices from downstairs and recognized Sam’s deep, powerful rumble. He must have gotten back from his jaunt to the art galleries with Carolyn and Eve.
    When Phyllis reached the bottom of the stairs, she could see into the parlor. Sam stood there with both of the McKenna twins on their feet, looking at him with angry expressions on their faces. Carolyn and Eve stood by, clearly worried, while Frances Heaton still sat on the sofa, wearing a smug smile now.
    “I told you fellas I’m sorry for your loss,” Sam was saying. “I don’t know what else I can do.”
    “Get ready to defend yourself in a wrongful-death suit,” one of the twins snapped. “That’s what you can do.”
    “When our lawyers get through with you—” the other one began to threaten.
    Sam held up a hand to stop him. “If you take me to court, you’re gonna be mighty disappointed, boys. Even if you won, which I don’t see how you can because I didn’t have anything to do with your daddy dyin’, I’m livin’ on teacher retirement pay. You ever heard that old sayin’ about gettin’ blood from a stone?”
    “We don’t care. It’s not about the money—”
    Carolyn spoke up. “Whenever someone says it’s not about the money . . . then it’s all about the money.”
    “You stay out of it,” Frances Heaton said. “This is none of your business.”
    “It most certainly is,” Carolyn shot back, “whenever someone starts threatening a friend of mine!”
    A year and a half earlier, Carolyn had been adamantly opposed to letting Sam—or any man—move into the house. Things had certainly changed since then, Phyllis thought as she came into the parlor carrying the suitcase and tackle box.
    She was sorry that Sam had walked in and been ambushed by the McKennas like this. She said, “I have your father’s things. If you’ll take them I’ll go back upstairs and get his fishing poles. That will finish our business.”
    The brothers both sneered at her. “You just wish that would finish things,” one of them said.
    Sam looked like he was getting fed up with them and ready to squash both of them like bugs. Phyllis moved between him and the twins and held out the suitcase and tackle box.
    “Hold on a minute, Mrs. Newsom,” a new voice said. Phyllis looked over her shoulder and saw Chief Dale Clifton standing in the foyer. He smiled and pointed a thumb at the door. “Hope you don’t mind me barging in like this. The door was open, and I couldn’t help