Free The Secret Ingredient Murders: A Eugenia Potter Mystery by Virginia Nancy; Rich Pickard

the shock and grief that she did, she didn’t sense it. Soon they were all claiming to feel terrible, and maybe they did, she thought, giving them the benefit of the doubt. But in that first instant, the feeling that traveled round the table from one guest to another was … relief.
    She suddenly remembered Jason and asked his father if he’d seen the boy.
    “He’s down there,” Kevin told her. “I left him with Stanley.”
    “You did what? ” Donna exclaimed, looking horrified.
    “He can handle it, Donna,” he snapped at her. “I couldn’t just leave the body there. But I have to get back.” He released his daughter, whose skin looked pale as pudding beneath her dyed red hair. Kevin Eden ran back outside into the storm. The mayor hurried to the telephone to call the police. At the dinner table, Genia was the only one to shed tears for Stanley Parker.

      5
L EFTOVERS
    An endless hour later Kevin Eden returned to Genia’s rented house, to her kitchen, trailing his silent, wet, bedraggled son behind him. Everyone else had gone home, taking their speculations and excitement with them, leaving her alone to await some final word. Even Donna had departed with Janie. The girl had wanted to run out into the rain after her father; it took the combined efforts of the grown-ups to persuade her not to go.
    “Kevin, Jason,” Genia said anxiously to them as she led them in from the rain. “I’m so glad you came back here. I’ll fix you something warm to drink. Would you like something to eat?” In a crisis, she felt a need to feed people. “Sit down, and tell me everything, won’t you?”
    The men looked exhausted as they took chairs at the kitchen table and slumped there, dripping onto the floor.
    “We’re making a mess,” Jason mumbled.
    “Don’t worry about it.” Genia bustled about, pulling coffee and hot chocolate mix out of a cupboard, and then putting a kettle of water on to boil and getting the coffeepot started, too. “You must be cold, and I don’t have any men’s clothing here to give you. Hold on a minute and I’ll be right back.”
    She hurried to switch on the furnace and then to snatch blankets out of the linen closet. To the absent owners of the house she murmured, “Forgive me for getting your blankets muddy. I promise I’ll get them cleaned, or replace them.”
    Back in the kitchen as the smell of burning dust began to waft from the heating vents, she draped the blankets over the shoulders of the men. Jason, who was shivering, huddled deep in his, but his father shrugged his off his Hawaiian shirt, and it fell over the back of the chair. “Thanks, Genia,” he said, “but I’m fine.”
    “Tell me everything, from the start, Kevin.”
    She pulled leftovers from the refrigerator, arranging them on two plates and then warming the plates one at a time in the microwave.
    “I was coming in to your dinner,” he said.
    She was pleased to hear it. Donna would have said this proved he was ill-mannered, to appear at a dinner for which he had not called in his RSVP. Genia chose not to judge his manners, but she did reflect upon how little she really knew this man, in spite of the fact that he had fathered her grandniece and nephew.
    “Well, now you’re getting it after all,” she said equably.
    “Yeah, thanks. So, I was coming over from the island in my boat, and I tied up my boat to a tree, and I was starting to climb up to get to your house, and I saw somebody lying in the rocks. I thought—I don’t know what I thought—but I went running over, and there was Stanley. He was limp, and his head looked all bashed in from the rocks, and his eyes were wide open. I knew he was dead.”
    Genia felt a last bit of resistance inside her give way as she finally realized she must accept this news as true: Stanley Parker was dead, and there was no mistake about it. She realized she had been holding out a hope that Kevin would come running back to say he’d been wrong, that it wasn’t