Free Keeping Mum (A Garden Society Mystery) by Alyse Carlson

this. He has like forty friends and he doesn’t want to worry what you think. I’ll keep an eye.”
    Cam was still a little offended, but she supposed it made some sense. Annie cheered every time her dad got lucky, and Cam preferred not to think about it. But Annie would tell her if anything big happened, or if anybody who was a bad idea appeared in the mix.
    She was just about to clarify that with Annie when her dad returned, looking pleased. “I gave her a sample of that pumpkin cheesecake and she ordered one for Thanksgiving.”
    Annie looked back at the cheesecakes. Two pieces were missing from one. Her jaw dropped.
    “What?” her dad asked. “I tried it and it was fantastic!”
    Annie rolled her eyes. “I can’t leave you unsupervised!”
    Her dad chuckled. Cam knew that he preferred to think of himself as a bit of a renegade.
    She finally worked up the nerve to ask her dad about the night before—about what he saw and did, and how frequently he was with his date throughout the evening.
    “Well, she was the victim! I hardly saw her once she got up from supper to powder her nose! Though we were both surrounded by people the whole time, if that’s what you’re asking.”
    It was, but now that he said it, Cam felt guilty for it. She hadn’t been accusing
her dad
, but the question sounded like it.
    “I’m sorry, Daddy. I just . . . from a motive perspective . . . Vi may run against Jared, and having his event go wrong . . . really wrong . . .”
    “She’s not running for that seat. She’s going for the House of Delegates.” He looked very proud.
    “Really?”
    “Not that she said anything about cronyism in the state Senate,” he said.
    Annie snorted.
Great.
Cam didn’t need the two of them feeding off each other when she was trying to get to the bottom of something.
    “You said she got up to powder her nose. When?”
    “Dessert. Because I got to finish hers—she’d left it.”
    “And had she just gotten her role?”
    “As a matter of fact, she had.”
    Annie made a frustrated noise. “That was us. We told her to use the excuse, but to get out to the murder scene.”
    Cam nodded. “Okay, so what about during the party—before supper. Did you and she ever talk to Derrick?”
    “Not me. Though when I stopped to shake Alden’s hand—you know, because of you girls—I did hear her scoff at him and say, ‘You wish!’”
    “At Derrick?”
    Cam’s dad nodded, looking proud again. Cam thought he hadn’t quite processed the implications.
    “Did she say what it was about?”
    “Didn’t ask. I figured it was politics.”
    “Okay. Did you see anything that might have been a clue about Annie’s dad?” Cam asked.
    “No . . . I did see him later, though, after supper. And I know what time it was. Or . . . well, I can tell you. Because I got a game hint: where I was supposed to go and what to say for the game. It came on my phone—the alibi I was supposed to be using.”
    He pulled his phone out and scanned his texts.
    “Nine forty-two. So I saw him at maybe nine forty.”
    “Was he with anyone?” Annie asked.
    “Not that I saw. He was on the phone and it didn’t look game related.”
    “We can get that,” Annie said. “Jake can look up who he talked to.”
    “And
where
was he?”
    “Fairway of the first hole. I was at the tee.”
    “Fairway? That’s where Derrick was.”
    “Well, I saw the crowd, but my first clue, officially, was on the other side of the clubhouse, so I quit following the crowd. Alden was a little farther down.”
    “So that means he was taken after the murder,” Cam said.
    “It would seem so.”
    “It also means he might have seen it,” Annie said.
    Cam wrote down the details. It wasn’t much, but it was definitely more than what they’d known before. Not that Jake would have shared details with her, though maybe he would with Annie. It was
her
dad, after all, who was missing.
    • • •
    • • •
    W hen lunch was over and they all rose and hugged,