Free Fogged Inn by Barbara Ross

certificate. I’d created the gift certificates on my laptop. So as not to embarrass myself, I’d started the serial numbers at 100001 instead of 1. The four gift certificates I’d collected the night before had been sold during the first week of November as a part of a lot of five. That raised so many questions. First of all, who had bought them? I checked the app I used to process credit cards. It didn’t store or provide much information, just told me the credit card had been approved and gave me a transaction number. Yet I must have written down the name of the person who bought them. I had to have mailed the certificates to the purchaser somehow. I searched through the notebook I kept next to my computer, looking for the information. Nothing. Then I searched my e-mails and found nothing. I must have written the name and address on a scrap of paper and thrown it away.
    I checked my phone. If the buyer hadn’t e-mailed, he or she must have called. But again, we were improvising, using my cell phone for reservations and other calls to Gus’s Too. As a result, I’d become even more attentive than usual about checking messages and deleting the ones I had dealt with.
    As I’d feared, there were no calls on my phone from unknown numbers. I couldn’t find what I needed, because I’d thrown out a scrap of paper and cleaned out my voice mail box. Hoist by my own anal-retentive petard, as it were.
    I called Lieutenant Binder but was sent straight to voice mail. I left a terse message about discovering something odd.
    After thinking about it for a moment, I took most of the cash the customers had given me the night before and moved it to my wallet. I’d stop at the ATM to deposit it the next time I went out. I left the cigar box with the gift certificates in it on my desk, next to my laptop. That way I would be certain to remember to take them to the police station in the morning.
    * * *
    I went back to the couch, but exhausted as I was, I couldn’t settle. I realized I had to eat something for dinner. My refrigerator was cleared out for Gus as I’d promised, and the one downstairs was barricaded by crime scene tape. Over a mostly lazy weekend, we’d finished off the last bits of Thanksgiving turkey at my mother’s house. Her larder was as bare as my own. The supermarket closed at six in the off-season. It was almost seven.
    I resigned myself to the only alternative left to me, unless I wanted to take a long drive off the peninsula, which I most certainly did not. I had to go to Hole in the Wall Pizza, the most depressing food emporium in the Western world. Since my return, I’d discovered by dint of experimentation that their Greek salad was passable—if you didn’t mind limp lettuce and picked your way around the pinkish tomatoes, which were as hard as baseballs and about as tasteless. As long as you didn’t order any “extras” like grilled chicken on the salad, your meal was likely to be edible. I’d made that mistake once, and whatever it was on that salad, it wasn’t chicken.
    I called in my order. The owner had a passel of adult children who all seemed to work in unpredictable shifts. Each one had a unique spin on the Greek salad, and I wondered what I would get. Then I went downstairs and walked out into the parking lot, headed to my mom’s house to pick up my car, which I kept in her garage.
    Just as I passed the Dumpster, my sister, Livvie, cruised into the parking lot in her ancient minivan. “You ready?” she called.
    â€œReady for what?”
    She pantomimed an exaggerated sigh. “For the Sit’n’Knit. Don’t tell me you forgot.”
    I had. I had completely forgotten the Sit’n’Knit. “It’s been a crazy day,” I answered.
    â€œSo I’ve heard.”
    News of the body in the walk-in would be all over town. But that wasn’t the only reason I’d forgotten the