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

studying it again. “Was anyone running for anything when Mitchell was murdered?”
    “I don’t know. We’ll have to look into that. Keep going.”
    “Mitchell Wells could have done it,” I said, reading the next note I found.
    “Mitchell? Who was he supposed to have murdered? What other victim are we talking about here besides he and Albert?”
    “No, you don’t understand,” I said. “It appears to me that Albert believed that Mitchell might have killed himself.”
    “With a dagger to the chest?” Annie asked me skeptically. “It’s not a suicide method I’ve ever heard of before, have you?”
    “No, but you said we needed the list to be thorough.”
    “Okay,” Annie reluctantly agreed. “Go ahead and write his name down. Mitchell needs to be on the list of people who might have killed him, too. Who’s the next unlucky contestant on this weird game show we seem to be caught in the middle of?”
    “Let’s see,” I said as I pulled out a scrap of envelope. “Oh, this is a good one. Harriet Parton’s name is on this.”
    “Could that be the rigged election he was talking about earlier?” Annie asked.
    “Maybe. We’ll have to see if she was even running for office back when Mitchell was murdered.”
    “You know, now that you mention it, she was acting rather strangely in class this evening,” my sister said. “Harriet took off in the middle of the session and didn’t show up again until we were almost ready to eat.”
    I nodded, and then I pulled another fragment of paper out. “Wasn’t Sally Tremont in your class tonight as well?”
    “As a matter of fact, she left right around the time that Harriet took off,” Annie said.
    “Well, surprise, surprise, Albert suspected her, too.”
    “Is there anyone in town he didn’t think might have committed the murder?” Annie asked me.
    “I don’t know. Let’s see.” As I read more of the notes, I began to separate them into piles, one for each name mentioned. By the time we were finished, we hadn’t added any new names to our master list, but some of the speculations were pretty wild. “That’s it. What have we got?”
    “Let’s see. There’s Mitchell himself, and then we have Betty Murphy, Ollie Wilson, Harriet Parton, and Sally Tremont. That makes four folks that Albert suspected, if we discount the suicide theory.”
    “I think that’s pretty safe to do at this point,” I said. “So, the next question is, do we try to make sense of his ramblings, or do we throw in the towel and start from scratch?”
    “We might be better off with a clean slate all around,” Annie said. “First, let’s see if we can figure out what each person’s connection to Mitchell was.”
    “I have another question. Should we focus on Mitchell’s murder, which happened ten years ago, or should we look into Albert’s, which just occurred this evening? Won’t the clues be a lot fresher in Albert’s murder?”
    “No doubt, but that’s probably where Kathleen will be spending most of her time,” Annie said. “I’m not saying that we can’t look into both, but I honestly believe that whoever killed Albert is the same person who murdered Mitchell Wells.”
    “Okay, you make a good point,” I said. “What should we do with this mess?”
    “We can’t just turn it over Kathleen,” Annie replied.
    “I don’t see why not. What can she possibly get out of it that we can’t?”
    “I’m not saying that we don’t give it to her. I just think that we should copy it all first.”
    “By hand?” I asked her. “It will take hours to figure his handwriting out, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t have that kind of patience.”
    “We have a copier in back, Goofball,” Annie reminded me. “I can have these copied in five minutes, and then we can give them to our big sister with clear consciences.”
    “Are we going to tell her that we’ve got a set of our own?” I asked her.
    “I don’t see what purpose that would serve,” she said.