Free Killer Crab Cakes by Livia J. Washburn

murder could he have?” Carolyn asked. “Did he and Mr. McKenna even know each other?”
    “I guess. I don’t know. Tom never had much to do with the guests. But Mr. McKenna has been coming here for several years. He and Tom probably talked a little now and then.”
    “It sounds to me like you don’t need to worry,” Phyllis told her. “Tom doesn’t have any motive, and it’s quite a stretch to even say that he had the opportunity to poison Mr. McKenna.”
    “Yeah, but it’s all gonna come out anyway, the part about him being a drug dealer and being in prison. And then the girls . . . the girls will find out . . .”
    “They don’t know?” Phyllis asked.
    Consuela shook her head. “That their papi is a jailbird? No.”
    It had been a long time since she had heard anybody use the expression “jailbird,” Phyllis thought. No matter what you called it, though, it wasn’t a good experience to have, especially when you’d been sent to prison for something as sordid as selling heroin. And it wasn’t something that would make your children look up to you, either.
    “Well, maybe it won’t come out,” Phyllis said. She knew it was a pretty weak thing to say, but those were the only words of consolation she could come up with.
    Consuela looked up at her and shook her head. “Unless they find the killer right away, it will. When it’s murder, everything comes out.”
    Thinking back to the other cases she’d been involved with, Phyllis knew just how true that was. Murder had a way of dragging everyone’s secrets out into the light, no matter how ugly they were.
    And she knew all too well that everyone had secrets . . .
     
    Consuela calmed down after a while. She had a meal to prepare, and her dedication to her job meant that she couldn’t neglect that duty, no matter how upset she was. She summoned up a smile, even though Phyllis could tell that it was false, and shooed everyone out of the kitchen.
    “We’re having seafood quesadillas tonight,” Consuela told them. “And I guarantee, no poison.”
    The weak attempt at levity fell flat, but after everything that had happened, no one paid much attention to the failed joke. Phyllis, Sam, Carolyn, and Eve went out into the parlor and left Consuela to her work.
    Carolyn leaned close to Phyllis and asked in a half whisper, “Do you think it really is safe to eat the food now?”
    “Of course it is,” Phyllis answered without hesitation. She didn’t believe for a second that Consuela was guilty, nor that her husband, Tom, or their daughters were involved with Ed McKenna’s death.
    But someone had poisoned those crab cakes, she reminded herself, and she had a hard time believing that anyone else who had been in the house could have done such a thing.
    That was one of the problems with murder, she reflected. Somebody had to be guilty.
    A short time later, the Blaines and the Forrests returned from wherever they had been all afternoon. The day had warmed up considerably, and they all looked a little heated. Even though it was autumn, the days could get quite warm, especially with the constant high levels of humidity factored in.
    The guests were laughing among themselves as they came into the house, which bothered Phyllis a little. It was true that the four of them hadn’t exactly been friends with Mr. McKenna, but they had sat down at the same table and shared meals with him. To Phyllis’s way of thinking, a little more decorum on their part would have been nice, as a way of showing respect for the deceased.
    She saw Sam frowning and asked quietly, “Does it bother you, too?”
    “ ‘ Any man’s death diminishes me,’ ” he quoted. “Hemingway, right?”
    “I think he got it from John Donne.”
    Sam shrugged. “Works either way. You’d think it’d bother ’em at least a little that a fella they knew keeled over dead this mornin’. Of course, they don’t know yet how come he died.”
    “That’s right,” Phyllis said as the unpleasant