“And then . . .” Rose said. “Money truly is the root of all evil. Wasn’t Bernadette going to look further into this horrid man’s financial affairs?”

  I dropped into a chair and pulled out my phone. “I do believe she was.” I put the phone on speaker so Rose could listen in, and I made the call.

  “I was going to give you my report in the morning,” Bernie said. “I had some luck. Earlier I said he seemed to be doing okay. Not quite right. Wesley Schumann is, essentially, underwater.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He’s more than broke, Lily. From what I can find, which isn’t always fully conclusive, he has substantial debts he can’t pay.”

  “I know he isn’t rich, but I didn’t know things were that bad. West Steak House is doing well, isn’t it?”

  “Have you been keeping up with the gossip in the Manhattan restaurant world, Lily?”

  “No. I made some calls when that reality TV show was filming here, but no one I spoke to said anything about Wesley. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know. I still don’t want to know, but it looks as though I need to.”

  “Do you know the name Luis Rodrigues?”

  “Sure. He’s the head chef at West when Wesley’s not around. Wesley owns the place, his name’s on the sign, and he designed the menus and all, but he doesn’t work there full time. Particularly not now that he’s trying to open more restaurants.”

  “Luis quit about six months ago, not long after you left, Lily, and everyone says the food has gone steadily downhill since then. Word is Wesley was coasting on both Luis and you. Luis with the meals, and you as the pastry chef. And now that you’re both gone, West Steak House doesn’t cut it anymore. Hey, I made a pun. Get it?”

  “I get it. One of my friends told me she had lunch there not long ago, and she wasn’t impressed. The filling in her chocolate pie was too sweet and too runny. I thought she was being nice, thinking she was making me feel better about leaving by telling me the new pastry chef wasn’t doing a good job.”

  “Reservations are down by more than half in the past six months. Staff, both front of house and kitchen, are quitting in droves, and Wesley’s paying bottom dollar for their replacements.”

  “Meaning he’s giving his customers bottom-dollar service.”

  “Yup. On top of that, a major new restaurant opened less than a block away, serving the same sort of food, and it’s getting glowing reviews from basically everyone.”

  “Thanks, Bernie.”

  “I had to do a bit of digging into the finer details, but none of this is a terribly well-kept secret,” Bernie said. “Any people Wesley might approach to invest in his new venture are going to have all this info. And more.”

  “Let me think it over, and we can talk tomorrow.”

  “Night, Lily. Night, Rose.”

  “Good night,” my grandmother and I said.

  “Is all that significant, do you think, in the matter of the death of Kimberly?” Rose asked once I’d disconnected.

  “It might well be. If Wesley’s reputation is on a downward trajectory, no respectable businesspeople will be willing to hand over piles of money for his restaurant venture. Anyone who still wants to invest will expect Wesley to put a heck of a lot of his own money into it, or no go. He needs that inheritance. Which puts him firmly in the frame as preplanning Kimberly’s death.”

  “It also means, love,” Rose said, “that he might have to make deals with less than respectable businesspeople. The sort of people who might have decided to . . . shall we say . . . help him secure that inheritance.”

  * * *

  Armed with what I’d learned last night, I called Amy Redmond once breakfast service was finished in the B & B, and Éclair and I had retreated to the privacy of our porch with a welcome mug of coffee, a slice of coffee cake, and a dog biscuit.

  I’ve suspected, more than once, that on occasion Bernie goes places on the Internet she isn’t supposed to go. It could be tricky, telling the police what we’d learned, without coming right out and telling them how we know. In this case, it was easy. All I was doing was speculating, and I’d invite the detective to speculate also.

  “How’s the investigating going?” I asked.

  “Well enough. Have you learned something I need to know?” She got straight to the point, as always.

  “I might have. You might know this, or you might not, but . . .”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I have a lot of contacts in the Manhattan restaurant world. I asked a few questions of my friends.” Okay, that wasn’t entirely true, but no need to complicate things. “I learned that, basically, West Steak House, Wesley Schumann’s flagship restaurant, is failing. It would appear,” I added with a touch of pride, “it started down the slippery slope shortly after I left.” Honesty forced me to add, “Probably more because the acting head chef left around the same time, but never mind. My point is that restaurant provides Wesley’s main income, as far as I know. I dated him for a while, and I didn’t see any other sources of funds. Believe me, if he had money to splash around, he would have. He had a TV gig for a short while, but it ended prematurely and nothing else came up.”

  “We’ve been investigating the financial situation of all the people in this matter, Lily. Why are you telling me this?”

  “I suspect you don’t know a lot about the restaurant biz.”

  “That’s true.”

  “In some ways it’s unique, in others it runs like any other business. At the Manhattan Michelin-star level, the head chef is the restaurant. Even if he has a chain of places and is the star of a reality TV show or runs a culinary school and is rarely, if ever, to be found with his sleeves up working in front of the ovens. If West Steak House fails, it will fall squarely on Wesley Schumann. He will have failed, and no one, no matter what sort of business we’re talking about, will pour money into a failing venture. Or give money to a man seen as a failure.”

  “Yet he’s still running around the Cape making deals to open new restaurants. Trying to make deals, I should say.”

  “Therefore, I have to conclude that his potential business partners either believe he’s about to come into enough money to fund the majority of the venture himself, or those partners are the sort who don’t worry a great deal about reputations. If you get my drift.”

  “I believe I do, Lily. We have the NYPD making some inquiries into Mr. Schumann and his affairs. At the moment that’s all I can say.”

  “Okay. Can I ask one quick question?”

  “Only one?”

  “Does Wesley have an alibi for the time of his wife’s murder?”

  She was silent for such a long time I thought she wasn’t going to answer, but eventually she said, “No. He had dinner in Orleans with a couple of Hyannis businessmen. They arrived at the restaurant separately and left separately at eight fifteen. One of the men is positive about the time because he received a phone call from his daughter away at college as they were on the sidewalk saying good night. It’s about a half-hour drive from Orleans to Victoria-on-Sea, faster in a fancy sports car for someone who doesn’t worry too much about accumulating speeding tickets. Mr. Schumann could have arrived at your place as early as twenty to nine.”

  “I heard Kimberly outside my cottage at nine. You and I saw him drive up around, what, nine forty-five, ten? Any possibility the man with the college-age daughter is lying about the time?”

  “The other man they had dinner with agrees with the time frame, and the waiter at the restaurant confirms it. He remembers them well—big spenders, small tippers. Schumann himself doesn’t dispute it. He says he had a lot to think about and went for a drive before returning to his B & B. He says the prospects of the deal going through were not looking good, and he had to decide what he was going to tell his wife. Like a lot of men who are too full of themselves, too anxious to impress to think things through before speaking, he hastened to assure me that if one deal fell through he had plenty more irons in the fire. Which might mean less respectable businessmen, as you call them, Lily.” A small chuckle came down the line. “Sometimes being a young woman is an unexpected benefit in this job.”

  I rolled my eyes, although only Éclair was here to see me. Wesley had tried flirting with Amy Redmond. Did the man have no common sense?

  I answered my own question: No.

  “Before you go, Lily, I’ll tell you one more thing. The NYPD spoke to the staff at West about possible enemies their boss might have had. No one told them about a former employee slash girlfriend stalking him or otherwise causing trouble.”

  I started to say, “So?” when I realized the police had been asking about me.

  “The staff has turned over almost entirely since you worked there, but one busboy remembered the incident you told us about which occurred between Wesley and you the night you quit, and he backed up your version of events. That person went on to tell us Wesley badmouthed you every chance he got for a long time.”

  “Thanks for checking,” I said.

  “Did you doubt we would?”

  “No.”

  “As you are no longer a suspect, Lily—not that in my mind you ever were a very good one—I’ll thank you to keep yourself out of my investigation.”

  “ ’Bye,” I said. Easier said than done. Under normal circumstances, I’d be more than happy to go back to work and forget all about what had happened, but Bernie was like a bloodhound on the trail, and once Rose’s curiosity had been unleashed, there was no controlling it.

  As for me: Rachel and Kimberly and, most of all, Wesley had involved me in their domestic affairs. I wasn’t going to drop it that easily.

  Chapter 18

  I might want to continue investigating, but not being a detective, I didn’t know what to do next. I had no leads to follow.

  So I finished my coffee and headed into work.

  And leads followed me.

  As I was crossing the lawn next to the rose garden, heading for Tea by the Sea, a gray Audi pulled up. I expected a distinguished-looking older couple to step out, but to my surprise the man who emerged was Stephen Smithfield, and I remembered Kimberly had also been driving an Audi. Her car had been taken away by the police following her death. It must have been returned to the family, and Stephen was now using it.

  He was dressed in ragged-hemmed jeans worn in the knees in what I suspected was not a fashion statement and an AC/DC T-shirt that had seen better days. The untied laces on his right sneaker dragged along the ground behind him. They appeared to be dragged regularly, and the shoe had a hole in the side. His hair was disheveled and he hadn’t bothered to shave this morning. Again, not a fashion statement, just neglect or a lack of concern about his appearance.

  He walked toward me and gave me a nod of greeting.

  “Stephen. Good morning,” I said.

  “Morning. You’re Lily, right? We met at my house in Chatham yesterday.”

  “I remember. Can I help you?”

  “Help me? No, not really. I wanted to . . . have a look around.” He indicated Victoria-on-Sea shining in the morning sun.

  “Are you interested in gardening?”

  “Gardening? No, why do you ask?”

  “Our gardens are open to the public and they’re considered to be very good. Garden clubs come a long way to see them. You’re welcome to tour them, but the house is private.”

  He rubbed his jaw. A man and a woman—him in garish plaid trousers and orange golf shirt, her in a short white skirt, sleeveless pink top, and pink sun visor—came down the steps.

  “Good morning,” she called to me. “What a great day to hit the links.” They got into their car and drove away.

  “My father golfed,” Stephen said to me.

  “Is that so?”

  “He was keen I take it up. In my mind golf must be just about the most boring sport there is. He said it didn’t matter if I liked the game or not; if I wanted to be a successful businessman, I had to golf. I told him I didn’t want to be a successful businessman, I wanted to be a successful musician. Turns out, I was neither. I’m sorry I wasn’t nicer to you and your friends yesterday, when you came to the house.”

  “You don’t have to apologize. This must be a difficult time for you.” He wasn’t, in fact, rude to us, but to Helen, and that was not a relationship I wanted to concern myself with.

  “No more difficult than any other. Thing is, Helen Chambers has always gotten under my skin. She doted on me when I was little, but as soon as I became a teenager and my father and I started having our differences, she turned on me. She could be more vicious to me than my dad. Always under the pretext of speaking her mind and only wanting what was best for me. She didn’t get on all that well with my mother, either, but Mother was too kind to get rid of her. Now that . . . Mother’s gone, Helen’s enjoying having the house to herself. I sometimes suspect she pretends to herself it’s her house.”

  He grimaced and said, “Sorry. All that’s not your problem, is it? I don’t quite know why I’m here. I wanted to see where my sister died, I guess.”

  “Were you two close?”

  “Not really. My parents were unemotional people, and my sisters and I were raised to be the same. I was the youngest, and a boy, so my father had different expectations for me than he did for the girls. All water under the bridge now. Can I see it?”

  “See what?”

  “Where Kimmy died.”

  I hesitated. I didn’t want crime-scene groupies poking around, but Stephen was Kimberly’s brother. “I . . . I don’t know where exactly, but it happened at the back of the house. Near the cliffs. If you want to have a look around, that should be okay.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Have you spoken to Rachel since Kimberly’s death?” I asked.

  “Yeah, she called me yesterday afternoon. I told her the cops were looking for her, and she said she’s spoken to them and has been cleared. I don’t know why she’s hanging around. Still imagining she’s going to find some secret will my mother wrote on her deathbed, I guess.”

  “You think she’s imagining that?”

  “The will existed, but it’s long gone now. Rachel can’t let it go. She’s always been like that. If Rachel wants something, she wants it, and no one can tell her she can’t have it.”

  He started to walk away, heading for the back of the house. I wasn’t sure what to do. I got the feeling Stephen Smithfield wasn’t entirely emotionally stable.

  The door to the house opened and Wesley came out. His laptop bag was thrown over his shoulder, and he was dressed in ironed beige slacks and a white shirt. He stopped when he saw me. Or, I realized, he stopped when he saw whom I was with.

  The edge of his mouth curled up and he gave his head a shake.

  The two men stared at each other for a moment, and then Wesley slowly crossed the veranda and came down the steps. “Looking for me?”

  “No,” Stephen said. “I’m here to see the place where my sister died. Where you killed her.”

  I sucked in a breath, but Wesley didn’t seem all that concerned at the accusation. “If you’ve got something to say, kid, spit it out.”

  Stephen shrugged. “Whether you killed her or not, the result’s the same, isn’t it? You get her money. Which is all you really ever wanted.”

  Wesley sneered. “I hear you’ve moved into the house. Into what’s now my house. I’ll give you to the end of the week to pack up and get lost.”

  “My mother’s will hasn’t been settled yet. In the meantime, I’m fine where I am, thanks.”

  Wesley’s face tightened. A vein began to pulse at the side of his neck. I recognized the signs and wanted to get out of there, fast. “Let’s go, Stephen. I’ll walk with you.”

  Stephen and I walked away. I felt Wesley’s eyes following us.

  “You don’t get on with your sister’s husband?” I said once we’d rounded the corner and the open waters of the bay appeared before us. Behind us, Wesley’s car roared up the driveway, going far too fast.

  “I only met him twice. At Mom’s funeral and then at his and Kimmy’s wedding. He’d just started going out with Kimmy when Mom died. I couldn’t stand him on sight. He’s supposedly some big hot shot in the restaurant world. Ironically, they met through Rachel at some fancy art gallery opening or something. We had a small reception at the house after Mom’s funeral. The moment that guy saw the house, I could see the dollar signs dancing behind his eyes. He married Kimmy in a rush, certainly not the big, splashy society wedding of her dreams, supposedly out of respect for my mother’s passing. More to get it done as fast as possible, I say. He expected her to inherit my father’s family fortune. Turns out there’s not much of a fortune left and what scraps there are, Kimmy and Rachel were fighting over.”

  “Do you think he killed her?”

  “I don’t know. I said it because he was looking at me in that way he has of thinking I’m something stuck to the bottom of his shoe. Kimmy and I never got on, but she was my sister and she deserved better than she got. Better than a self-centered gold digger like him. Better than”—he choked—“an early death.” He turned his head away from me and wiped angrily at his eyes. He wandered toward the railing and stood there, staring out over the calm waters of the bay.

  “If you need anything,” I said at last, “I’ll be in the tearoom at the top of the driveway by the road.”

  He didn’t reply, and I left him to his thoughts.

  * * *

  It was shortly after one and I was making icing to decorate the coconut cupcakes, when Rachel barged into my kitchen once again, followed by Cheryl, who made “What can I do?” gestures.

  “It’s okay,” I said to Cheryl. “What do you want now?” I said to Rachel.