Page 56 of Welcome to Murder Week

“I’m not sure this one was purchased.” Wyatt picks up a note card that is sitting on the table next to one of the glasses and hands it to me. It reads, “Trace—thanks for, well, all of it. XO, Dev.”

“He’s got thick dark hair,” Wyatt says.

“And he’s tall,” Amity says.

“So?” I don’t know what they’re getting at.

“The nosy neighbor said the man who visited Tracy on Monday afternoons, when the salon was closed, was tall and had a thick head of dark hair,” Amity says.

“Dev’s bar doesn’t open until eight o’clock,” Wyatt says. “It could have been him.”

Was Dev playing me? He was part of this all along?

“Why would he have been here?” I say. “What would be the motive?”

Amity glances back to the bedroom. I follow her gaze to the negligee on the floor.

“You think Dev was sleeping with Tracy?” I say.

“Not in real life,” Amity says. “It’s pretend, remember?”

“He might be our man,” Wyatt says.

At his cottage, Devdidsay the murderer was a man. I go over my encounters with him—at the village green, the opening-night dinner, in his cottage, on the drive, at Stanage Edge. Did he say anything that could have revealed a plausible motive for him to kill Tracy? He didn’t mention Tracy or the mystery at all, except to say he was initially a skeptic.

“The dashing distiller has some questions to answer,” Wyatt says.

“Yes, he does,” I say. I can’t deny it. I’m excited by the thought of putting the squeeze on Dev. “I’ll drop by his bar and question him later.”

“We’llallgo,” Amity says.

“Are you worried that my investigative abilities might be compromised by my—”

“Libido?” Wyatt says.

“The word I was going to use was ‘friendship,’?” I say.

From Tracy’s we head to the village’s sole Indian restaurant. Over curry, we review the evidence we saw at the flat.

“The eviction notice on the table seems to be enough to rule out Bert Lott,” Wyatt says.

“But doesn’t it confirm what we already know—that he wanted Tracy out of the salon?” I say.

“Yes, but if he was taking legal action to evict her and had a court date set for a month after the murder, it makes no sense that he would kill her,” Amity says.

“Okay, no more Bert Lott.”

It feels like we’re making progress. We look at the photos on our phones to see if there are other clues. There’s one of the card we found in the wastebasket from whoever sent Tracy flowers. But it’s too late to call the Willowthrop Florist, so we put that off for tomorrow. We also agree we need to ask around about the “Pippa” mentioned in Tracy’s Filofax. She’d written “TELL PIPPA” and underlined it with such force that the page was nearly torn. What was she going to tell her? Did it have anything to do with why Tracy was murdered?

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Dev’s bar is packed. The Tampa book club women are sitting at a big round table, raising glasses and toasting with Naomi and Deborah. As soon as she spots us, Deborah jumps up and rushes over.

“It’s the three mush-keteers!” she slurs.

Naomi is on her heels. “We went to another bar first. Bad intel but good drinks. I’m afraid my sister overindulged.”

“Isn’t this place marvelous?” Deborah says. “I want to move to Willowthrop and come to this charming establishment every night. It will be my Cheers. My Cheerio!”

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