I gave the onlookers my best professional smile. “Everything is in hand. Please don’t let us keep you from your evening plans.”

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with what happened to that poor woman yesterday, does it?” the girl’s mother asked.

  Neither Rose nor Wesley replied, so I said, “If your assistance is needed, we’ll let you know. Thank you.”

  She finally got the hint and headed up the stairs. Her son went with her, but the girl stayed where she was, eyes wide with interest. Her mother snapped at her to get a move on, and she reluctantly followed them.

  “Let’s go into the drawing room and talk there,” I said to Wesley.

  “I don’t want to go into the drawing room,” he snapped at me. “I might sue.”

  Robbie hissed. Rose put her hand on his back and stroked him. He didn’t relax.

  “That would be your prerogative,” I said. “But first can you please tell me what’s happening?”

  “Better still,” he said, “I’ll show you. Let’s go to my room.”

  Maybe not such a good idea. I wasn’t going to venture into Wesley’s room, particularly not when he was so angry. Angry about what, I still didn’t know. “No.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Rose said. “I want to see for myself.”

  I reasoned that I should be okay with my grandmother acting as bodyguard, and we followed Wesley up the stairs. Robbie leapt off the desk and ran on ahead.

  Wesley and Kimberly had been given room 202, a suite with a sea view and a spacious balcony. The door was half open, the wood around the handle smashed. I exchanged a worried glance with Rose, cautiously pushed the door aside, and stepped through it.

  I stopped dead. Rose crashed into the back of me. “Goodness,” she said. Robbie hissed once again.

  Goodness was right. The room had been tossed. Drawers were pulled open, the contents spilling out. Clothes, Kimberly’s as well as Wesley’s, had been pulled off their hangers and thrown aside, pockets turned out. The bedspread had been torn off the bed and the sheets, too. The side tables and the sofa were partially pulled away from the wall, the cushions tossed on the floor. The paintings were either hanging askew or off the wall altogether.

  “I . . . I don’t know what to say,” I said.

  “Obviously, someone’s been searching for something,” Wesley said.

  “You don’t know what they were after?”

  “Not a clue.”

  It had to be the lost third will. I didn’t say so. “Did you lock your room when you left?”

  “Of course I locked it. What do you take me for?”

  I didn’t answer that, either.

  “I got here a few minutes ago and immediately realized something was wrong with the door.”

  “It’s been forced,” Rose said.

  “What time did you leave?” I asked.

  “I went up to your childish little tearoom to talk to you around eleven,” he said. “After that I got the car and went into town without coming back in here. I had a lunch meeting in Truro and then people to see in Provincetown. Potential investors in the new restaurants. I returned ten, fifteen minutes ago and found . . . this.”

  “I am so sorry,” Rose said. “Nothing like this has ever happened before. I—”

  “That’s the point,” I said. “Nothing like this has ever happened here before. If you brought something worth stealing, Wesley, you brought the person who’s looking for it with you.”

  “You’re not turning this on me, Lily. My wife died yesterday. She was a woman of considerable means, and I’m guessing one of your staff decided to have a poke around and see if she left anything of value behind.”

  Rose straightened to her full formidable five feet nothing. She thrust her chin forward and her eyes blazed. “Now see here, young man. My staff are all as honest as the day is long.”

  Under the force of her fury, Wesley took a step backward. Unfortunately, he wasn’t intimidated into silence. He smirked at me. “By staff, I’m including Lily.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “My alibi, not that I need one, is iron clad. I was in my restaurant all day.”

  “In the kitchen, where the only people who saw you are dependent on you for their living.”

  “Are you suggesting . . . ?” Rose sputtered.

  “Yes,” I said, “he is. Pay him no attention. I suggest you call the police, Rose, and report this. Due to the death of one of the people who occupied this room as recently as yesterday, they’ll be interested. Very interested. You should also call Jean and ask her when she cleaned in here. She would have said something if she’d found the room in this state. That’ll give the police a timeline.”

  Wesley picked up a shoe. One of Kimberly’s, a sandal with far too much bling for my taste.

  “Don’t touch anything,” I said. “The police will want to see everything in situ. If you take a seat in the drawing room, I’ll bring you a coffee or tea while we wait.”

  He threw the shoe aside. “Never mind. I have dinner plans with an important investor, and I have no intention of canceling or being late. The police can track me down, if they want to bother. Small-town cops, useless the lot of them.” He headed for the stairs at a rapid clip.

  “I sense,” Rose said once his footsteps had faded away, “that man has some conflicting emotions toward you, love.”

  “Nothing conflicting about it. He wants me to grovel and when I won’t, he lashes out. Never mind that. This is a big problem. I’ll make the call.”

  I phoned Amy Redmond and told her what had happened. She said she’d be right over.

  “If Wesley decides, out of pure meanness, to make something out of this,” I said to Rose, “it can cause us problems. First a death, and now a guest room being ransacked.”

  “If he wants to cause problems,” Rose said, “he should have stayed to wait for the police. Leaving, business dinner or no, indicates to me he doesn’t consider the issue to be all that important. Nor is the sanctity of his property. He left without asking that the door be sealed pending the police arrival. I will mention such to anyone who asks.”

  I gave her a fond smile. Excitement over, Robbie headed for the stairs and Rose and I followed.

  “Do you have any idea what someone might have been after?” my grandmother asked.

  “I suspect I do. Kimberly’s mother died recently, and her will’s being contested. It’s rumored she wrote a final will which changed the primary benefactors. That will has conveniently disappeared. I can’t see it could be about anything other than that.”

  We took seats in the drawing room to wait. Rose settled in her favorite chair, and I perched on the window bench, keeping an eye out for the police. Had Kimberly told Wesley about the existence of a third will? Perhaps not, not if she suspected he’d married her to get his hands on her inheritance. If she hadn’t, might Rachel have told him? Possible. He’d spoken to her recently, when he told her he and Kimberly were staying at Victoria-on-Sea. Rachel might have asked him to let her know if he came across a handwritten document. She might not have told him why she wanted it, but he wasn’t a total idiot.

  Was it possible Wesley himself was searching for the third will? If he stood to inherit everything from Kimberly, he wouldn’t want a new will showing up giving half to Rachel. Had Kimberly brought the will to Victoria-on-Sea with her and put it someplace in their room without telling him where? Had he been searching for it, and either didn’t find it or did find it and tossed the room to make it look as though someone else was after it?

  My head spun.

  While we waited, Rose called Jean, the weekday housekeeper, and asked what time she’d been in room 202 and if she’d noticed anything amiss. The answer was obviously in the negative, and Rose thanked her and hung up without explaining why she was asking.

  “I suppose it’s pointless to ask her if she saw anyone in the house today who shouldn’t have been here,” I said.

  “Jean cleaned that room shortly after noon and nothing was out of place. She says no one was in the house when she did the rooms, as is normal on a fine day. Even if she had seen someone in the hallway, she doesn’t interact with the guests and has no way of knowing who’s a guest and who might be an intruder. As for me, I spent the morning in my office going over the accounts. After lunch, I had a walk and a pleasant chat with Simon about his plans for expanding the rose garden. I was at my post”—meaning the reception desk waiting for check-ins—“between three and five. After the last arrival was settled, I returned to my room, which is where I was when I heard that awful man bellowing for me. I saw no one who’s not a guest in the house itself, but random people were wandering in the gardens, as is normal.” Our gardens are open to the public. They are, according to Tripadvisor, the number one garden attraction in North Augusta. There is no number two. A good part of the reason Rose can charge as much as she does for a stay at Victoria-on-Sea is the quality of the landscaping on the property.

  “Anyone could have come in,” I said. The front door’s normally kept unlocked during the daytime. “But they would have had to know what room to go to.” Rachel? It was entirely possible, likely even, Rachel had been the one searching the room. When Wesley told Rachel where he and Kimberly were staying, he might have mentioned which room they were in.

  My phone beeped.

  Bernie: Where are you? We’re waiting at Matt’s.

  Me: You’ll have to go without me. Something’s come up.

  Bernie: What?

  Me: Trouble. What else?

  Bernie: On my way

  Me: No need

  Bernie:

  I put my phone away as the police car turned into the driveway. I went to let them in.

  Chapter 12

  I wiped my fingers on a paper towel torn off the roll. That had been one good pizza, smothered in mushrooms, onions, and peppers, exactly the way I like it.

  Dinner with my friends had turned into takeout pizza in the B & B kitchen, joined by my grandmother.

  Bernie, along with Simon and Matt Goodwill, had arrived minutes after the police. They cooled their heels on the veranda while Rose told Redmond and Williams what had happened, and I took them upstairs to have a look at room 202. They were not impressed, to put it mildly, to hear that Wesley decided he had more important things to do than wait until they arrived.

  I asked Redmond if they’d been able to locate Rachel, and she gave me a sharp shake of the head. About that, she was clearly also not impressed. Once the police left, I told my friends I wasn’t in the mood to change and go out to a restaurant, so Matt ran to his house for beer and a bottle of wine, while Bernie called to order pizza delivery, and I went home to let Éclair out. Simon had gone with Matt and they’d returned with, of all things, a door and a doorhandle and the tools to install it in room 202.

  The house where Matt now lives had been his family home for generations. It’s as big as, and at one time had been as grand as, Victoria-on-Sea, but it’s been unoccupied and ignored for years, allowed to gradually crumble into the rocks and sand. He’s doing most of the renovations and repairs himself, as time and money permit. Conveniently, he had doors ready to install.

  “Wesley didn’t appear to be concerned that anything had been taken,” I said, first to the police and then to my friends once we’d gathered in the kitchen. “More upset about the invasion of privacy, more interested in making a scene. He didn’t search for anything, or check if anything was missing.”

  “That seems odd,” Bernie said.

  “Perhaps not. He’d been in his car, so he would have had his wallet, keys, and phone on him, and he carried a laptop bag. Maybe those are the only things important to him.”

  “What about his wife’s stuff?” Bernie asked. “Her purse? Jewelry?”

  “He went into his room before calling for me,” Rose said. “I didn’t hear him arrive, so I don’t know how long he’d been upstairs.”

  “He could have put anything he wanted into the laptop bag,” I said. “Or had a quick search before coming downstairs and found nothing of value missing.”

  “Jerk,” Bernie said.

  “You two talk as though you know this guy other than him being a guest here,” Matt said.

  “A bad memory for Lily,” Bernie said.

  “Don’t ask,” I mumbled around a slice of pizza.

  Matt and Simon exchanged a shrug. “Okay.” Simon took a sip of his beer. “We won’t ask. What happens now?”

  “About the break and enter, Redmond called Wesley, and she’s arranged to meet him in town later. About the other matter, nothing we can do but hope the police get whoever killed Kimberly.” As Matt opened the box in search of another slice of pizza, I caught Bernie’s eye and gave my head a quick jerk. She nodded.

  Simon looked from one of us to the other. I gave him a smile. He didn’t return it.

  * * *

  Pizza demolished, beer finished, wine bottle empty, case discussed, and no conclusions reached, Rose said good night. and she and Robbie retired to their rooms. I stifled a yawn, and Bernie said, “Enough excitement for one day for me. I’ll walk you home, Lily.”

  Simon and Matt leapt to their feet. “We’ll come with you.”

  “No need,” Bernie said.

  “No problem,” Matt said.

  “Our pleasure,” Simon said.

  I called for Éclair, locked the kitchen door behind us, and we strolled along the edge of the cliffs toward my cottage. The tide was coming in and below us waves crashed against the rocks.

  We reached my gate. “Sorry to ruin your dinner plans,” I said.

  “I had fun,” Matt said. “Your grandmother’s a hoot.”

  “She has her moments.”

  “Good night, Lily,” Simon said.

  “Good night.”

  Simon glanced at Matt and he must have read something in his friend’s face before he turned and walked away.

  Matt shifted his feet. “Feel like coming over for a nightcap?” he asked Bernie.

  She yawned. “Not tonight, thanks. I’m beat. See you tomorrow maybe.”

  “Okay, tomorrow. Uh . . . your car’s at my place.”

  “So it is. You run along, and I’ll follow in a minute.”

  “Night, then.”

  “Good night,” I said.

  He continued along the cliff path, heading for his own house. Éclair began to follow, and I called her back. Bernie let out a long breath. “You owe me big-time, Lily Roberts. I’ve hurt his feelings, and just when we were starting to get to know each other better.”

  “Starting? You’ve been cozying up to each other for weeks.”

  “These things take time.”

  “Since when did you ever take time over a relationship?”

  “Since I met Matt. He’s . . . special. Never mind that now, what’s up?”

  I let us through the gate and dropped into a chair on my porch. Éclair sniffed around the foundations of the cottage and under bushes, searching for signs of recent intruders.

  “I didn’t want to talk about it in front of Matt and Simon. You know what men can be like.”

  Bernie perched on a porch railing. “Wanting to take over. Rush to the rescue and all that.”

  “Rose too. You know what she can be like.”

  “Also wanting to take over and rushing to the rescue.”

  “I’m getting seriously worried about this situation, Bernie. Wesley implied to the cops that I had reason to kill Kimberly.”

  Her face was a picture of pure shock. “What!”

  “On the grounds that I am such a jealous . . . you know what . . . I killed his wife to get him to come back to me.”

  “Jerk. Surely the cops don’t take that seriously?”

  “Redmond, not at all, and she told me such. As for Williams . . . I don’t trust him not to take the easy route and arrest the most convenient suspect. Meaning me.”

  “We’ve never gotten on with Williams, true enough, but I can’t see even him doing that, Lily.”

  “At the moment, no. But these things can escalate. The break-in of Wesley’s room? No one is in a better position to do that than me.”

  “Except you have no reason to have done it.”

  “If I’d wanted to search his room, I’d take the spare master key off the hook in the kitchen and let myself in, not break down the door. But that’s beside the point. I feel threatened by all this, and I want to know more about what happened to Kimberly and what’s going on now.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I know you’re busy with the book and all—”

  “Come on, Lily. This is me, Bernie. What have you got in mind?”

  “This all started with the Peter Rabbit tea chest and its hidden contents.” I filled Bernie in on the details of what Rachel had told me about her mother’s will. Wills.

  “So this missing third will was hidden in the tea chest.”

  “Almost certainly. Kimberly found it in the tearoom and left with it. Where it is now is the question a lot of people seem to want answered. The other question is what people might do to either recover it or ensure it’s never seen again.”

  “Don’t you think Kimberly would have destroyed it as soon as she got her hands on it?”

  “She didn’t open the envelope in front of me, so I’m only speculating as to what was in it based on what Rachel told me. If it was the third will, it’s possible Kimberly didn’t have time to get rid of it. Burning paper in a guest room might have set off the smoke alarm. Maybe she didn’t want to attract attention. Maybe she wanted to keep it for some unknown reason, even if only for a short while. We have to conclude that whoever searched Wesley’s room earlier today was after the third will. Whether they found it or not remains unknown.”

  “What about Wessie himself?”

  “He’s not a patient man and he has a temper. It was his room, but he might have been frantically trying to find it—if he suspected Kimberly hid it in the room—and only when he finished did he realize the extent of the mess he’d made and then he had to find someone to blame. We have only his word he didn’t come back to the house earlier today.”

  “You need security cameras, Lily. I’ve told you that before.”