Killer Crab Cakes (13 page)

“I don’t know about the Blaines and the Forrests,” Nick was saying, “but Kate here is a financial whiz. She’s a vice president in a real estate development company. That’s how she and I met.”

Kate pushed her hair back from her face and smiled. “Don’t make it sound more impressive than it is, honey. You didn’t mention that my father owns the company. I’m a living, breathing case of nepotism.”

“Are you kidding? Your father would fire you in a minute if you weren’t doing the job to suit him.”

“Anyway, I know what Sheldon Forrest does,” Kate said. “His wife told me one day while we were talking. He’s an aerospace engineer. He has something to do with NASA there in Houston where they live.”

“That’s interesting,” Phyllis said. “Leo Blaine doesn’t strike me as an engineer. Of course, maybe he’s not. He and Sheldon may not be friends from work.”

“Maybe they go to the same church,” Sam suggested.

Phyllis doubted that. If the sort of hanky-panky she suspected was going on among the Blaines and the Forrests was really taking place, then they weren’t the churchgoing type, either.

“Anyway, about the SeaFair,” Nick went on, “what do they have besides a gumbo cook-off and crab races and arts and crafts?”

“A dessert competition,” Phyllis and Carolyn said simultaneously.

Nick looked back and forth between them for a second before a sly smile broke out on his face. “Ah, ladies! Do I sense a bit of rivalry?”

“Don’t get them started,” Eve advised with a laugh. “They’ve been trying to outdo each other at cooking contests for years now.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Carolyn said. “It’s not that bad. We just enjoy baking, isn’t that right, Phyllis?”

“Of course,” Phyllis said. And Carolyn enjoyed winning all the contests she had won, too. Of course, Phyllis reminded herself, she would be less than honest if she didn’t admit that she relished her occasional victories, too.

“So you’re both entering the dessert contest at the SeaFair?” Kate asked.

“I suppose so,” Phyllis said. “That’s one reason we came down here.”

“What are your recipes going to be?”

Phyllis and Carolyn looked at each other, but neither said a word.

Nick hooted with laughter. “I think you hit a sore spot there, sweetheart. There’s a little culinary intrigue going on, maybe.”

“I prefer to keep my recipe to myself until the actual contest,” Carolyn said rather stiffly. She unbent a little as she went on, “But you can read it later, because I think they publish the winning entries in the newspaper after the contest. That’s the way these competitions usually operate.”

“Well, I’ll, uh, have to keep an eye out for that,” Kate said as she glanced at Phyllis. She knew as well as everyone else around the table that Carolyn had just staked her claim on having the winning entry.

Phyllis didn’t rise to the bait. For one thing, there were different divisions within the contest, and as long as each of them kept her recipe secret, they wouldn’t know which division the other was entering. It might turn out that they weren’t even competing directly against each other.

So Carolyn’s implied boast didn’t bother Phyllis. She had known her old friend for way too many years to let such a thing get under her skin. She just said, “I’m sure all the recipes will be good ones. There are bound to be a lot of fine cooks around here.”

“But I reckon the best ones still come from Weatherford,” Sam said.

Nick laughed and picked up his glass of iced tea. “I’ll drink to that,” he said. “A gallant sentiment, Sam.”

“Like Walter Brennan used to say, ‘No brag, just fact.’ ”

“Who?” Kate asked.

 

At least the discussion about the SeaFair and its assorted attractions had gotten everyone’s mind off poison for a while, Phyllis thought later as she settled herself in front of the computer in Dorothy’s small office nestled behind the kitchen. She didn’t even mind the slight awkwardness that had come up concerning her long-running rivalry with Carolyn. That was a small price to pay for making the situation more comfortable for everyone else.

Now, though, everyone had scattered throughout the house. Nick and Kate were in their room. The Blaines and the Forrests had returned from supper and gone to their rooms, too, and Lord knew what
they
were doing up there, Phyllis thought. The Lord could know, but she certainly didn’t want to. Consuela had finished cleaning up after supper and had gone home. Sam was in the parlor watching TV; Phyllis could hear it through the office door, which was open a couple of inches. Eve and Carolyn were around somewhere, although she didn’t know exactly where.

And she was at the computer, about to go poking around in things that technically were none of her business.

Dorothy had told her enough about the software program the bed-and-breakfast used to keep track of its guests so that Phyllis was able to open it without any trouble. She wasn’t the most naturally computer-savvy person in the world, but she had learned enough to navigate her way around most common programs. She didn’t have any trouble locating the files that contained information about Leo and Jessica Blaine and Sheldon and Raquel Forrest.

It was pretty basic stuff, she saw as she scanned through the pages. Names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers and expiration dates, scans of everyone’s driver’s license. There was a space for employment information, and Phyllis saw that Sheldon listed his employer as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, just as Kate had said. Leo’s employer was listed as the Jefferson-Bartell Group, whatever that was.

That was all she found in Dorothy’s files, so Phyllis began surfing the Internet. She did a search for Sheldon’s name first and found that he was the author of a number of articles about mass propulsion and overcoming inertial drag, all of which had been published in various technical and physics journals. Some of them were available online, and Phyllis called up one to look at it.

She had done reasonably well in all the science courses when she was in school herself, including physics, but Sheldon’s article was just so much gobbledygook to her. It might as well have been written in a foreign language. From the looks of the comments accompanying the article, though, Sheldon seemed to be a well-respected member of his profession.

She didn’t find anything personal about him online, only the work-related articles. She moved on to Leo.

The search on his name brought up a lot more hits. Some of them were links to newspaper stories. Phyllis began checking them and found that most were from the society pages of the Houston newspaper. They included photos taken at various charity events and fund-raisers, and Leo and Jessica were in most of them. Smiling and dressed in a tuxedo, Leo didn’t appear nearly as unpleasant as he did when he was blustering and stomping around here. In a low-cut evening gown and with her hair artfully done, Jessica Blaine was positively gorgeous, Phyllis discovered, not at all the perky, wholesome little housewife Phyllis had first taken her for.

The real surprise was seeing Raquel in some of the photos with the Blaines. She looked equally glamorous. The captions identified her as Raquel Jefferson Forrest.

There was the link between the couples, Phyllis thought as she typed swiftly. She did a search for the Jefferson-Bartell Group.

It took only a few moments for her to discover through numerous newspaper and business magazine articles that the company specialized in designing high-tech electronic guidance systems, with much of its work being done for NASA. Phyllis leaned forward as excitement gripped her. Ed McKenna’s company in San Antonio manufactured electronic components. Maybe one of its contracts was with the Jefferson-Bartell Group.

The next fifteen minutes were frustrating as Phyllis continued navigating the tricky waters of the Internet. She found quite a few mentions of the prosaically named McKenna Electronics, but nothing that connected the company to Jefferson-Bartell. She read a story about Ed McKenna stepping down as CEO but remaining as president while his sons, Oliver and Oscar, handled the day-to-day duties of running the operation. She found another article from the business section of the San Antonio paper about Oscar McKenna being reassigned to the research division of the company while his brother, Oliver, remained as CEO. Phyllis had already heard about that, but this was confirmation of Oscar’s demotion. The newspaper story gave no reason for the action, but she knew it had to do with some mistake Oscar had made that cost the company a considerable amount of money.

She didn’t find anything about Frances Heaton. Frances must keep a pretty low profile, Phyllis thought. It was unusual in this day and age to run into anyone who didn’t have at least a few pages on the Internet that mentioned them.

Engrossed in what she was doing, she went back to looking up everything she could about the Jefferson-Bartell Group. Founded by Charles Jefferson and Mitchell Bartell in the early eighties, it had ridden the crest of that decade’s high-tech boom and survived the bust of the nineties, remaining a viable player in the electronics arena with lucrative connections to the aerospace, oil and gas, and communications industries. Mitchell Bartell was dead, having succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 1997, but Charles Jefferson remained alive and in control of the company, aided by his son-in-law and vice president, Leo Blaine.

So Leo was a wealthy businessman and Sheldon was just a humble engineer, Phyllis mused, but Sheldon also happened to be married to the daughter of Leo’s boss. That was typical of the complex relationships, both business and personal, that grew up among people all the time, Phyllis thought.

But learning about it hadn’t brought her any closer to seeing a connection between the Blaines and the Forrests and Ed McKenna, other than the fact that they were all staying at the same bed-and-breakfast on the Gulf Coast. And if there was no other connection, then there couldn’t be any motive for any of them to be involved in McKenna’s murder, unless it had to do with something that had happened here at Oak Knoll . . .

Consuela hadn’t mentioned any problems between McKenna and the two couples from Houston, but Phyllis decided it might be a good idea to ask Theresa and Bianca about that. Even though she carried the title of head housekeeper, Consuela spent most of her time in the kitchen. What cleaning she did was there and in the other downstairs rooms. As far as Phyllis could tell from what she had seen so far, the two younger women were responsible for taking care of the guest rooms upstairs. That meant they might have seen things that their mother hadn’t.

“Never knew you to stay chained to the computer for this long,” Sam drawled from the doorway of the small office.

Phyllis looked up from the monitor, taken a little by surprise. She had been so wrapped up in her thoughts that she hadn’t heard him come down the hall from the parlor. “I’m just doing a little Internet surfing,” she told him.

“I don’t reckon that’s as dangerous as the other kind.”

Phyllis smiled. “No, I never saw the appeal of standing on a little board on top of a big wave, either.”

“Maybe we’re just not the adventurous types. At least, not most of the time.”

Phyllis wondered if he was talking about the time when a killer had tried to stab him. She still regretted that she had put his life in jeopardy that day, although he had passed it off lightly as just a bit of excitement. It was easy to get caught up in the mental challenge of trying to solve a murder, Phyllis thought, but at the same time there was always real danger involved.

Because a person who had been driven to kill once usually wouldn’t hesitate to kill again to keep his or her crime a secret.

“I’d just as soon have my adventures vicariously,” Phyllis said.

“Speakin’ of which . . .” Sam jerked a thumb toward the parlor. “There’s a John Wayne movie fixin’ to come on, if you’d care to join me.”

Sam was just about the world’s biggest John Wayne fan, and Phyllis didn’t mind watching the Duke. It had been a long day that had gotten off to an early, highly unpleasant start with Ed McKenna’s death, and ever since then Phyllis’s mind had been full to bursting with the convoluted possibilities that accompanied any murder. Sitting on the sofa next to Sam and watching John Wayne put things right for a couple of hours might be just the thing she needed in order to relax before turning in.

With a smile, she logged off of Dorothy’s computer and said, “That sounds just fine to me, pilgrim.”

P
hyllis’s sleep was restful, instead of haunted by dreams of Ed McKenna’s death as she had feared it might be. No answers came to her as she slept, though, so when she woke up just before dawn the next morning she was no closer to knowing who the murderer was than when she went to sleep.

As she went downstairs, the delicious aromas of coffee brewing, bacon frying, and biscuits baking greeted her and told her that Consuela was already on the job. Phyllis went into the kitchen and saw that Consuela was preparing the usual full breakfast, including
huevos rancheros
and
migas
.