“Williams would,” Bernie said. “If it means he can get home in time for dinner.”

  “I’m not so sure,” I said. “Redmond’s increasingly taking over, and he doesn’t seem to mind. I think he’s okay following her lead.”

  “I don’t trust him,” Bernie said.

  “Nor do I,” Rose said. “But time will tell. As usual Bernadette and I were on the same page, and I called her last night.”

  “Got her call about two minutes after yours,” Bernie said.

  The fat in the frying pan popped and sizzled, and I flipped the sausages.

  Like peas in a pod—or sausages in a frying pan—those two. I might look like Rose: blond haired, pale-skinned, pink cheeked, with a heart-shaped face and blue eyes, but in temperament she and Bernie were exactly the same. Compulsive, adventurous, risk-taking.

  “Now, where do we begin?” Rose settled herself at the table. Robbie leapt nimbly into her lap.

  “I see the gang’s all here,” Edna said as she came into the kitchen. “I was wondering what was taking you so long to show up, Rose. I have five orders for the full English breakfast and one for two poached eggs, medium. The bridge women are in, as is the couple. No sign of the Reynoldses yet.”

  “I was asking where we begin,” Rose said. “I do believe I’ll begin with a cup of tea, Edna.”

  “Kettle’s hot,” she replied.

  Chapter 16

  Teamwork. The essence, I’ve decided, of good detecting is teamwork.

  Bernie was investigating the affairs of the Reynolds and Hill families. Edna had put her husband’s staff checking into the events surrounding the death of Max Hill, Hannah’s father. Rose planned to invite Regina to tea later, with the intention of finding out exactly what the other elderly woman knew about the goings-on in her family. “No one,” she’d said to me, “knows more secrets than a so-called old woman. Like the servants of days long past, they’re almost invisible, and believed to be not too bright, so people talk freely in front of them.”

  “A mistake I would never make,” I’d replied.

  As for me—I had a tearoom to run.

  “I heard the bride’s mother was arrested for killing the groom’s father,” Marybeth said to me when she and Cheryl arrived for work.

  “Not arrested,” Cheryl said. “Questioned and released.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked. “I checked earlier and nothing had been mentioned in the online news.”

  Marybeth winked at me. “Town gossip. The sister of a civilian clerk at the police station told me when she picked the kids up for day camp.”

  “A civilian clerk gossips with her sister about what’s going on at the police station?”

  “Sisters. She has five. and they’re really close. The news’ll be all over town by now.”

  “Why do they keep her on? Shouldn’t that be a firing offense?”

  “She’s the chief’s wife’s niece. Also a first cousin to the mayor, I think. Is that right, Mom?”

  “Everyone’s a first cousin to the mayor. If not first cousin, then second or third. Including us. Never mind that. I would have thought, Marybeth, after what happened with me when that stupid TV show was filming here, you’d know better than to repeat mindless gossip.”

  Marybeth hugged her mother. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “The problem with gossip, is that the juicier it is, the faster it travels. Regardless of the truth, which if it isn’t worth gossiping about, doesn’t travel far at all.” Cheryl freed herself from the hug. Her face was full of the memory of when she herself had been a murder suspect. The issue had been complicated by the fact that she and none other than Chuck Williams had once been in a relationship which had not ended well.

  “We’ve a full reservations book for today,” I said. “So let’s get to it. Not only that, we also have a private tea for two to cater at two o’clock today.”

  “Cater?” Cheryl said. “We don’t cater. Do we?”

  “Only on special occasions,” I said. “And if it suits my own nefarious purposes.”

  * * *

  At quarter to two, I left a busy Tea by the Sea with a packed picnic hamper. Inside were two sets of china from my personal Royal Doulton Winthrop collection, an Old Country Roses teapot containing leaves of Darjeeling, four freshly made scones, egg salad with herby mayonnaise sandwiches as well as salmon pinwheels, pistachio macarons and fruit tarts, and small containers of clotted cream, and jam.

  I never make scones for the B & B breakfasts, nor do I bring out my good china, and I prepare the tea with store-bought tea bags, not carefully selected leaves from custom suppliers. If I didn’t do that, what reason would guests have to come to my tearoom?

  I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on to make the tea. While it heated, I carried the hamper into the drawing room. I arranged two chairs next to each other, with a small table between, and dragged the coffee table in front of them to make a proper setting for tea. In times past, afternoon tea was sometimes called “low tea,” meaning it was served on a low drawing-room table as opposed to “high tea”, a working family’s evening meal served on a high kitchen table.

  I arranged the dishes and the food and stepped back to admire my handiwork. The presentation appeared suitable for afternoon tea with Queen Victoria and Anna, Duchess of Bedford. Although the servings of food were substantially more than those ladies would have expected.

  Back in the kitchen, I poured hot water over the tea leaves before texting Rose: Let the show begin.

  She replied: [fingers to the lips emoji]

  I waited a couple of minutes and precisely at two o’clock, I carried the fragrant, steaming teapot to the drawing room.

  Rose and her guest had taken the two chairs I’d arranged. For once Robert the Bruce had not been invited to join my grandmother.

  “This is quite delightful,” Regina said. “Rather like being at Buckingham Palace. I heard the late queen was fond of her afternoon tea. Is the new king also?”

  As though Rose, simply because she’s English, would know that.

  “My contacts back home tell me he is,” Rose replied, as though she had friends who moved in the king’s innermost circles. “He’s devoted to tradition, as was his mother. If you’d be so kind as to pour the tea, please, Lily.”

  “My pleasure,” I said. I poured the light, floral liquid, flavored with a slight tone of muscatel, into two delicate cups and placed each on the table between the chairs.

  “Thank you for inviting me to join you, Rose,” Regina said. “I simply could not bear yet another outing with my family. McKenzie and Sophia are spending a day at the spa. Sophia claims she needs relief from the tension of the past few days. What she means is she wants to spend my money while she still can.”

  My back to Regina, I wiggled my eyebrows at Rose. She kept her face impassive.

  “Greg, the hopeless romantic, is off somewhere fussing over Hannah,” Regina continued. “Ivan’s gone into town to see what he can about making arrangements to get Ralph home. Poor lost Ralph. My only child. Lily’s your granddaughter, I understand. How many children do you have, Rose?”

  “Four sons and one daughter, Lily’s mother. I have five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

  “Ah yes, grandchildren.”

  I slipped out of the room, closing the door silently behind me.

  We’d chosen our teatime carefully. At two o’clock on a sunny day, no one should be hanging around the house. As Regina had conveniently confirmed, the Reynolds family had all gone out. The bridge women asked Rose for recommendations about whale-watching trips and she’d not only laden them with brochures, she phoned to make the booking herself. The other couple staying here checked out after breakfast, and new arrivals wouldn’t check in until after four. The weekend housekeeper was upstairs, accompanied by the roar of the vacuum cleaner.

  An earlier owner of this house had, for reasons of their own, installed a secret room behind the linen closet next to the drawing room. Rose discovered it during renovations and later showed it to me. We never intended to spy on our guests, but we’d thought it great fun to know about the secret room. No one else, not even Bernie, did.

  It proved convenient on other occasions when police and murder suspects had met in what they thought was the privacy of the drawing room.

  I slipped into the linen closet, removed napkins, place mats, and tablecloths from two of the shelves and put them on the floor. I reached for the back wall and pulled the concealed lever. The bottom two shelves slid silently aside, and I duck-walked into the secret room, pulling the door closed behind me. We’d made the room moderately comfortable with a chair ruined when a guest dropped a lit cigarette between the cushions, and a small, dim lamp. I switched the lamp on. We’d tested the light to be sure nothing leaked out.

  The room had obviously been constructed for the sole purpose of listening to goings-on in the drawing room, as the separating wall was excessively thin. Not only that but a few discreet holes had been drilled through the lathe and plaster. A large painting of an eighteenth-century sailing ship heading out to sea hung over the holes on the drawing-room side in an ornate frame heavy enough to discourage anyone from causally rearranging it.

  I made myself comfortable and listened.

  “. . . delicious,” Regina was saying. “There is something about afternoon tea, isn’t there, Rose. Such a treat.”

  “It is. I’m sorry Hannah’s shower was disturbed by that misplaced gift. Rather a rude joke, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not so sure it was a joke. It had the desired effect, didn’t it? Poor Hannah was most upset. Her special day had been ruined.”

  “As was her wedding day,” Rose said.

  “Sadly, yes. Hannah deserves to be happy. As does Greg.”

  “Have you known Hannah and her mother long?”

  “Seems like forever. Jenny and Ralph were engaged to each other at one point. Did you know that?”

  “No. How odd. What happened? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  A mouse crept out from a crack in the wall. I watched it. Small black eyes watched me. Whiskers twitched. I waved my hand in the air. It didn’t move. I made shooing gestures. It still didn’t move. I’m not afraid of mice, not exactly. But if it jumped on me I might not be responsible for my actions.

  “It’s all ancient history now,” Regina said. “They were young, she met another man, she broke off with Ralph, and married the other man. Max Hill. He died when Hannah was a child. Jenny and Hannah moved away, and we had no more contact with them until about a year ago when Hannah and Greg got together.”

  “Please do have another scone. Isn’t the jam wonderful? It’s made from local berries, by a woman I know personally.”

  “I will, thank you,” Regina said.

  “How did Ralph take the breakup?” Rose asked.

  With her down-to-earth, working-class Yorkshire accent, only slightly faded after sixty years living in America, her tiny frame, her outlandish clothes, and playful hair and makeup, Rose is a woman people are comfortable talking to. She also just happens to be very good at gently steering a conversation in the direction she wants it to take. Notably Rose had not taken the opportunity to launch into a lengthy discussion of her own family.

  “Not well,” Regina said. “To put it mildly. He rushed into a marriage with the totally unsuitable Sophia. And it all went downhill from there.”

  “I’ve observed, if you don’t mind me saying so, that you and your daughter-in-law don’t get on overly well.”

  Regina snorted. “You noticed that, did you? Hard not to, sometimes. We hate each other. Always have. Her own family had been quite well off at some time, I believe, and she’d been brought up expecting life to provide for her. Her father was a lawyer, partner in a very prestigious firm. He got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He was lucky to escape jail, but he was unable to practice law from that point on, and so the family’s income and status declined. Sophia’s expectations declined along with them. She married Ralph when he was at a low point, on the rebound I believe the young people say, because she mistakenly thought he had money. More fool her. More fool him to stay with her all these years. Loyalty to the children most likely. Ivan arrived less than nine months after their wedding.”

  I thought about what Regina said when she arrived for tea. That Sophia was out spending her money. Not Ralph’s money or even the couple’s money. I sent a mental instruction to Rose to ask about that. Not that I expected her to pick up my thoughts from behind the wall, no matter how many holes had been drilled through it.

  The mouse took a step toward me. I bared my teeth and shook my foot at it.

  It might have yawned.

  “I should have acted to stop the marriage,” Regina said, “but by the time I realized he was serious about her, it was too late. Poor Ralph, I did love him, Rose. He was my only child. But, I hate to say it, he was too much like his father. Weak. Vacillating. Is that salmon do you think, in that sandwich? Not tuna? I can’t abide tuna.”

  “Yes. Salmon. More tea?”

  “Please. This is delicious. Not like the tea we get at home.”

  “I myself have been widowed for four years now. I miss my darling Eric every day. How long has it been for you, Regina?”

  “Seven years. Seven years of bliss.”

  Rose coughed lightly. I was surprised she didn’t choke on her salmon sandwich.

  “You think me blunt,” Regina said.

  “I think you honest.”

  “At our age, dear, we have no need to beat about the bush. No one to impress. Although we still have people to disappoint and I always enjoy that. I’m glad you had a happy marriage. My own was not the same. My father was a successful man. He built a successful business from the ground up. He was also very traditional, like your king. Times were different as well, back then. He selected Ralph’s father from among his junior executives to marry me. His intention was to groom my husband to eventually take over the firm. Instead, my father died of a heart attack in his early fifties, not long after my marriage. And my husband, Joseph, poor stupid Joseph Reynolds, proved totally incapable of running the company. Even after, particularly after, he changed the company’s name to reflect himself.”

  “Oh dear,” Regina said. “Did your father’s business then fail?”

  “No. Because someone in the family had a lick of common sense.”

  “Dare I guess that someone was you?”

  “You may. I ran the entire operation from behind the scenes for decades. It thrived; it grew. We prospered. Eventually Joseph began ailing and he couldn’t pretend to be in charge anymore. By then Ralph, our son, was a vice president. I’ve worked hard all my life. Dedicated my life to the firm my father built. Following my husband’s death, I began having a few minor health concerns myself, nothing serious but enough to remind me my days were coming to an end. So many things I hadn’t done in my life. So many places I hadn’t been. I decided to step away, to retire, to hand the business over to my son.”

  “How did that turn out? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “As well under Ralph as it had under his father. Only when it was too late, did I come to realize that it was not Ralph, but Max Hill who actually ran the company. When Max left, because a vengeful Ralph pushed him out, Ralph was simply out of his depth. So I stepped up once again. There appears to be something wrong with the men in Joseph’s family. First Joseph himself, then Ralph, and now Ivan. Weak and vacillating and indecisive, the lot of them.”

  “Ivan? You mean your grandson? Greg’s brother?”

  “He’s supposedly been learning the ropes under his father’s guidance. Instead, he’s been learning nothing, and now even Ralph’s useless guidance is gone. I was hoping to go to Italy in the fall. All the great art I’ve never seen. My plans will have to change, and I’ll have to take control, once again.”

  “What about Greg?”

  “Greg has been a disappointment to me in an entirely different way. He has no interest in the business. He wants to be”—she snorted—“an artist. And not only an artist but a large-scale mural artist. Painting the exteriors of buildings, that sort of nonsense. I cling, perhaps foolishly, to the hope he’ll tire of that and want to get involved in the family business. If not him, then Hannah. She is Max’s daughter after all. I like Hannah a great deal. It would be better if she married Ivan, but we cannot control the direction of true love, now can we? Much as we might wish to. My father made that mistake. Those tarts look lovely. Like little jewels. Almost too perfect to eat.”

  Almost, but not quite. Regina munched away for a few minutes. Rose poured another round of tea.

  Finally, to my infinite relief, the mouse decided he was bored with my company, and slipped away, disappearing into the crack from which it had come. I (quietly) let out an enormous sigh of relief.

  Deep in my pocket, my phone vibrated. I checked it.

  Marybeth: Are you going to be much longer? We’ve had more groups with children than expected and are running out of vanilla cupcakes and cookies.

  Me: Back soon. Check freezer.

  I glanced at the time as I put my phone away. Almost an hour had passed since I left the tearoom. Trying to operate a restaurant and be a detective at the same time wasn’t easy. I’d have to trust Rose to report the rest of the conversation to me later.

  I crouched down, ready to crawl out of the linen closet, when the front door opened and footsteps came into the hallway.

  “McKenzie. I saw you drive up. We’re in here!” Regina called.

  “A tea party,” McKenzie said from the other side of the wall. “Isn’t that lovely. Hi, Mrs. Campbell.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rose said, “but your grandmother and I seem to have consumed everything.”

  “Not a problem. Mom and I had lunch at the spa.”

  “Hello,” Sophia said.

  “How was the spa, McKenzie dear?” Regina asked.

  “Okay. I’ve been to better,” McKenzie said.

  “Why don’t you pull up a seat and join us for a few minutes,” Regina said. “Tell me all about your day.”