Murder by the Slice by Livia J. Washburn Read Free Book Online

of the booths. I’m pretty good with my hands.”
    “Now there’s an idea. I’ll get Marie’s number from Carolyn, and you can call her. I’m sure she could tell you who to talk to about that.”
    “I’d appreciate it. Like I said there at Wal-Mart, I never got to be around the carnivals much. Sounds like fun.”
    Phyllis went on into the house and found Carolyn and Eve in the kitchen, discussing the meeting at Loving Elementary. Eve turned to Phyllis and asked with a smile, “What were you and Sam talking about out there, dear?”
    Phyllis wondered if Eve had an ulterior motive for asking that question. For goodness’ sake, it wasn’t like she and Sam had been out in the garage smooching or anything like that! Eve had no reason to feel jealous.
    “Sam wants to help out with the carnival, too,” Phyllis said. “He’s talking about maybe helping build some of the booths.”
    “I’m sure he’d be good at it. He’s always building things. He’s very good with his hands, you know.”
    Again Phyllis wondered what Eve meant by that. On the surface, at least, it was just an innocent remark. Sam himself had said almost exactly the same thing. Phyllis told herself that she was being too suspicious and trying to read too much into everything. Eve seemed friendly again this morning, as if she had gotten over being miffed at finding Phyllis and Sam sitting together on the kitchen floor. Be grateful for that, Phyllis told herself, and move on.
    “I told him you could give him Marie’s number,” she said to Carolyn.
    “Certainly.” Carolyn and Sam hadn’t gotten along all that well when Sam first rented the empty bedroom upstairs, but over the months she had become friendly with him, even though she was still a little reserved around him at times. The reserve had all been on Carolyn’s part. Sam was the sort of man who was friendly with everybody right from the start.
    That quality might be tested, Phyllis thought, if Sam ever had to spend much time around Shannon Dunston.
    After lunch, Phyllis finally got around to going to the store for the ingredients she would need for her first trial run at the jack-o’-lantern cake. She planned to use a mix for the cake part just to simplify things, although when the time came to bake the one that would actually be in the auction, she would start from scratch. After all, someone would be buying it to eat, not just because it was pretty, and she wanted it to taste as good as possible. And no cake from a mix could ever be as good as one from scratch, at least to Phyllis’s way of thinking.
    While she was pushing her cart along the aisles in the food section at Wal-Mart, she heard a voice behind her say, “Mrs. Newsom, isn’t it?”
    Phyllis turned and to her surprise saw Shannon Dunston standing there, also with a cart. She shouldn’t have been surprised, she told herself. Everyone had to shop, even unpleasant people.
    The really unexpected part was that Shannon was smiling now and seemed quite friendly. She had obviously gotten over her bad mood from that morning.
    Or maybe she was manic-depressive, Phyllis thought. That would explain it, too. Then she mentally chided herself for not giving Shannon the benefit of the doubt. Marie had said that Shannon could be pleasant when she wanted to.
    “Hello, Mrs. Dunston.”
    “Please, call me Shannon,” the younger woman said as she brought her cart alongside Phyllis’s. “I hope you didn’t get the wrong impression from the meeting this morning. I know I can be a little impatient at times. There’s always just so much to do, and it seems like I’m running and running and running all the time, and it’s so hard to get people to actually help—” She stopped, shook her head, and smiled again. “But I don’t have to tell you that. You were a teacher. You know. And I know you saw me arguing with my exhusband, too. You couldn’t have missed it.”
    “I didn’t really pay any attention… ,” Phyllis began.
    “Oh,