Murder at the Tremont House (A Blue Plate Cafe Mystery) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Wheeler.
    Next I called David Clinkscales. He ’d given me the number of the bachelor pad he’d settled into after his divorce. “Kate! What good news. Of course, I’ll want to see you. How about lunch on Wednesday? And maybe Thursday?”
    I laughed. “David, you don’t have to do that, but I would like a visit. Just to bring you up to date on things in Wheeler and check on you. Huggles misses you, so I’ll have to give him a report.” David had gone with the children and me to get Huggles.
    “ I’ll have to come visit. I’ve been to my cottage a couple of times, and, well, I guess I just holed up and ate out of a can. I should have come to the café for chicken-fried steak.” He’d bought a cottage on a small lake near Wheeler within the last year, after his divorce. David loved East Texas; his now-ex-wife, not so much.
    “ Yes, you should,” I admonished him. “But I’ll give you a rain check. And I’ll come by your office about eleven-thirty Wednesday morning. If it turns out that doesn’t work for you, you have my cell phone.”
    “ It will work,” he said. “I’m looking forward to it.”
    Suddenly I wanted to tell David Clinkscales all about Sara Jo Cavanaugh.
    I had some detecting I wanted to do in Dallas, but I’d put it off until I got there.
    I went back to the café. That evening a group of four high-school boys came in for hamburgers. They ’d just been to baseball practice, they said. They sat and laughed and punched one another in the arm, having a good time but basically well behaved. Or so I thought until I was clearing the table next to theirs and overheard their conversation.
    “ Hey, man, I bet she’s hot, that Miss Cavanaugh who’s been nosing around school.”
    “ Yeah,” chimed in another one, “I think she’s sweet on Cary. She spends a lot of time supposedly interviewing him.”
    And yet another voice chimed in. “I bet she could show us some tricks. Come on, Cary, give. What do you really talk about?”
    Cary Smith, blushing to the roots of his reddish-blond hair, nodded his head in my direction, and the boys grew respectfully silent.
    Then one asked, “Miss Kate, what do you think of that reporter? She’s around the high school a lot, and some of us think it’s kind of funny. ’Course, I haven’t got to talk to her at all. But Cary has—a lot. He just won’t tell us about it.”
    “ Nothin’ to tell,” Cary muttered.
    He was, as far as I knew, a shy but good boy, an only child. His family moved to Wheeler from Dallas some five years ago, if what Marj had told me one day was correct. The father worked in Tyler doing I don’t know what, and the mother stayed at home. They almost never came into the café, though Cary came often with his buddies. The family apparently didn’t go to church and didn’t socialize much, so no one knew anything about them.
    “ Miss Kate, what do you think?” the questioner persisted.
    I wasn ’t about to give them an earful of what I really thought about Sara Jo Cavanaugh, so I just said, “I think it’s interesting that she chose Wheeler. I’d kind of like to know why. And I hope she doesn’t turn up any skeletons in anybody’s closets.”
    They boys tittered nervously, if titter is the right word for nervous laughter from young boys.
    “I bet you boys should be worrying about some pretty high school girls and not Sara Jo Cavanaugh.” I gave them a smile and moved on. After that, their conversations were quieter.
    ****
    When Rick came in the next morning, I realized I hadn’t told him I was leaving town. Not sure how I felt about the sense of obligation, I greeted him with his cup of black coffee. He barely glanced at me, took a sip without saying thanks or anything, finally lifted his head and looked at me. “Long night,” he said.
    I saw dark circles under his eyes and a droop about his whole bo dy. “What happened?”
    “ Two hours of sleep, that’s what happened. Domestic disturbance.”
    “ In Wheeler?” I