Maddie's Gift of Mystery (A Rockcrest Cove Cozy Mystery Book 5) Read Online Free PDF Page B

girl agreed.
    “Especially the speech Maria made.”
    “Well, that’s Maria. She loves the attention.”
    “Is that so? Were she and Jimmy that close?”
    “I never really saw them together, but Jimmy was close to everybody, you know.”
    “Look at her,” Maddie said, trying to direct the comments toward Maria. “She looks like she’s in her element right now.”
    The girl studied Maria for a moment. “Perhaps. She does seem a bit happier than usual, but she’s probably just trying to put on a good face. It’s a pretty sad loss for all of us. I guess we all have to deal with it in different ways.”
    “I suppose so,” Maddie agreed, not entirely convinced that was what she was seeing.
    Maddie left the mortuary before the interment so that she could meet up with Eleanor and Chief Willis for lunch. She already had developed her suspicions about who might be responsible for Jimmy’s death. It was unfortunate, but so far the only one who had raised even the slightest suspicion in the case was this young girl, Maria, and even that was just a hunch. She needed to know more about the interactions these students had with each other. And even with that knowledge, she couldn’t be sure that it was someone at school at all. In fact, it could very well be someone from some other aspect of Jimmy’s life.
    They met at the local diner on Main Street, just a short walk from her bakery. It was the perfect time of day, as there wasn’t much going on. It was just after two in the afternoon, so the lunch crowd had already made their way back to work and it was too early for the dinner rush to start. They had the place pretty much to themselves, so they could talk relatively freely without fear of being overheard.
    “Well, I must admit,” Maddie started, “that when you came into my shop the other morning, I didn’t expect I would be taking you up on your offer this soon.”
    Willis gave her a generous smile. “To be honest, I wish we had more time to become acquainted before getting into something like this.”
    “I agree,” Eleanor chimed in.
    “So,” Willis said, turning his attention to Eleanor. “I take it you think that we’re looking at the wrong suspect.”
    “Absolutely,” Eleanor said adamantly. “I know those two, and there is no way either one would hurt the other.”
    “It’s my understanding that they were kind of competitors though, weren’t they?”
    “If you want to reason that way,” Eleanor said, “all of my students should be arrested. I always encourage a friendly competition in my classes.”
    “Nevertheless,” he said, “they spent quite a bit of time together at the party on the night he died.”
    “Yes.”
    “They left together.”
    “Yes.”
    “Alone?”
    “Yes.”
    Willis began to flip through his pages of notes. “It’s my understanding that Emily was the last person to see him alive.”
    “That we know of,” Eleanor added. “She said she left him at his home alone. He’d had a little too much to drink, so she set him up on his couch and left.”
    “Hmmm.” Willis was thinking out loud. He looked again at his notes. “Yes, she said she left him at about one o’clock in the morning.”
    “That’s right.”
    “And then where did she go?”
    “She went home. Her roommate can account for that.”
    “Yes. Her roommate said Emily got home around one thirty.”
    “So, if you have all of that information, then why is she suspect in this case?”
    Willis reared back in his chair and eyed the two women carefully before he spoke. “Because we got the coroner’s report back, and it placed his time of death at around one in the morning—right about the same time that Emily said she left him alone.”
    Both women sat there in stunned silence.
    “And as far as we know, she was the last person to see him alive, and his body was found with Emily’s locket in his hand.”
    “Let me see that,” Eleanor said, taking the report from his hands.
    She studied the words on the