Free Cast Iron Conviction (The Cast Iron Cooking Mysteries Book 2) by Jessica Beck Page A

was stalking us, but I appreciate you pursuing it.”
    “I’d do anything for you,” he said. Had his voice always been that deep, or was the phone playing tricks on my ears? Then again, maybe I’d just never listened closely enough to really hear it.
    I was about to reply when Pat knocked impatiently on the door’s window. “Are you coming in or not?” I heard him ask loudly from the inside.
    “Timothy, I appreciate the apology, but I’ve got to go.”
    “Until tomorrow night, then,” he said richly.
    “Until then,” I said.
    After I hung up, I rejoined Pat, who was standing at the counter holding a long, sharp knife he’d gotten from one of our display cases. “Who was that on the phone?”
    “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “What are you waiting for? I’m here. Go ahead and open it.”
    He frowned at me for a moment, and then he plunged the knife into the plastic, parting it as though it were made of tissue paper.
    I crowded closer to him so I could see what Albert had left us.
    Hopefully, it would contain all of the clues that we needed to find not only Mitchell Wells’s murderer, but his as well.
    It would be the most fitting legacy he could leave us. 

Chapter 10: Pat
    “I don’t believe it. This is an absolute mess,” I said twenty minutes later as I looked up from the pile of notes that Albert had left for us in the hollow tree. “I’m beginning to think that everyone else is right. Prison really messed with the man’s mind.”
    Annie dove back into the stack of sticky notes, fast food napkins, discarded envelopes, and other debris from a normal person’s life and pulled out a few random scraps of paper. “Come on. It can’t all be rubbish.”
    “Really?” I asked as I pulled out a scrap of my own and read it aloud. “‘Betty’s lying! Mitchell didn’t have any goats!’ How can we take anything the man said seriously?”
    My twin sister tried to comfort me. “Are you sure that says ‘goats’? I thought it said ghosts.”
    “Does that make any more sense than goats do?” my brother asked me.
    “Pat, I’m not saying that he wasn’t a little off, but some of this could still be valuable.”
    “Like what?”
    “How about if, just for the moment, we ignore what Albert wrote and focus more on who is mentioned in all of this instead? Wouldn’t that at least give us a possible suspect list to go on?”
    I hated when my sister made sense like that, especially when I was in the middle of a rant. “Ghosts, Annie? Seriously?”
    “Like I said, ignore the content and focus on the names.”
    “Okay, I suppose it’s worth a try. How about if I go through them, and you jot down the names of people Albert suspected? Or would you like to do it the other way?” Albert’s handwriting could be haphazard at best, but I’d found a way to decipher most of it.
    “Your suggestion is great, goats notwithstanding,” she said as she grabbed a spare pad and pen from the register area. “Fire away.”
    “Okay. Well, we can start with Betty Murphy, and maybe the ghosts, too, whatever that’s supposed to mean.”
    “Forget about the ghosts!”
    “Sorry,” I said with a grin. Putting the note with the reference to Betty aside, I reached into the pile for the next one. “This one mentions Ollie Wilson.”
    “We know that Ollie and Albert didn’t get along, but why would Ollie want to kill Mitchell?” Annie asked me.
    “I’m not sure, but Albert must have suspected him for a reason. They had that fight in front of the Iron, and that wasn’t over nothing.”
    “Okay, Ollie’s name goes down on our list.”
    “I’d still love to know why Albert suspected him,” I said.
    “Maybe it’s in the note,” she said as she tapped it with her pencil.
    I tried my best to read what Albert had written again, but after a minute, I gave up. “‘The electric was rigged.’ What electric? How was it rigged?”
    Annie took the note from me. “Could it be election?”
    “Maybe,” I said after