Free Aunt Bessie Goes (An Isle of Man Cozy Mystery Book 7) by Diana Xarissa

managed
to give her husband a watery grin.   “What would I do without you?” she asked, squeezing his hand as he
pushed her chair in at the table.
    “You’d be in a
terrible fix,” Mike said brightly.   “Same as me without you.   We’ve been together way too long.   No one else would ever have us.”
    While he piled
a plate full of food for Sarah, he chatted brightly with Bessie, telling her
all sorts of inconsequential things about the flat.   By the time he delivered the plate and a
cup of tea to Sarah she seemed to have regained some control over her emotions.
    “I’m sorry,”
she said after she’d taken a sip of tea.   “The police aren’t even sure it’s Adam.”
    Bessie thought
of a dozen questions she wanted to ask, but she bit her tongue and sipped her
drink.   The woman was distraught and
now was the not the time for nosy questions.
    “The clothes
in the suitcases, they were Adam’s,” Sarah continued, answering one of the questions
Bessie hadn’t asked.   “And the
clothes the, um, the, well, I’m pretty sure all the clothes were Adam’s.”
    Bessie patted
the woman’s hand.   “Eat something,”
she suggested softly, her brain processing the fact that the skeleton had been
wearing Adam King’s clothes.   That
didn’t prove anything, of course, but it seemed to make it more likely that the
dead man was Adam.
    Sarah nibbled
on a biscuit for a moment and then sighed.   “I’m not hungry,” she said, pushing her plate away.
    “You have to
eat,” Mike told her firmly.   “At
least have a scone while they’re hot.   I did my best with your famous recipe.”
    Sarah picked
up her scone and took a tiny bite.   “It’s lovely,” she said, dropping the rest back on her plate.
    Bessie and
Mike exchanged glances.   Bessie
could tell the man was worried about his wife, but she wasn’t sure how best to
help her.
    “They’re
really delicious,” Bessie said to Mike.   The scone was light and fluffy, exactly as it should be.
    “Thanks,” Mike
shrugged.
    “I remember
when dad built that wall,” Sarah said as Bessie ate her scone.   “I couldn’t understand why he was making
the room smaller.”
    “Really?”
Bessie asked.
    “Don’t you
remember when my dad built that wall?” Sarah asked, grasping Bessie’s
hand.  
    Bessie shook
her head.   “I don’t think so,” she
said.  
    “It was thirty
years ago, right after Adam disappeared.   I’d moved out by then, of course, but I was visiting quite often, mostly
to see Adam, and then because I expected mum to be upset about Adam’s leaving.   Dad said there was some sort of leak in
the roof and he couldn’t be bothered to repaint everything after he’d fixed it,
so he was just putting up a new wall over the top of the old one.”
    “I suppose
that sounds logical,” Bessie said.
    “It wasn’t,
though,” Sarah said, shaking her head.   “He covered up the only window in the room and shrank the space noticeably.   I even asked him, at the time, why he
was building the new wall so far out rather than right over top the old wall,
but he made up some excuse about leaving space for the walls to breathe or
something.   Even I knew that the
walls didn’t need two feet of space for ‘breathing.’”   Sarah made air quotes around the last
word.
    “You couldn’t
possibly have guessed why he built it the way he did,” Bessie said soothingly.
    “I should have
known something wasn’t right about their story,” Sarah argued.   “Adam never would have left without
saying goodbye.”
    “You couldn’t
have known,” Bessie said.
    “No, but I
should have guessed.”
    “I can’t see
how,” Mike said.
    “Not that
they’d killed him, but that something was wrong,” Sarah explained.   “I kept visiting, expecting mum to need
my support, but she didn’t seem sad at all.   Even though I knew she didn’t really
like her children, I still expected her to be a little upset when he left so
suddenly and