A Body at Bunco : Myrtle Clover #8

Chapter Five

A tapping sound woke her up the next morning. For once, it was Miles tapping on her front door that woke Myrtle up, instead of the other way around.

And, even more shocking, the normally polite Miles didn't even seem to notice that he'd woken her up despite Myrtle's appearance at her front door with sheet lines all over her face and wearing a fluffy pink bathrobe.

"Hi Myrtle," he said solemnly. "I've been worrying over last night and I thought I'd pop over and we could talk over a cup of coffee."

"Sounds good," she grated in her early-morning voice. "As long as you're the one making the coffee, that is."

As Myrtle sat at her kitchen table, her gaze kept drifting over to her backyard. Although she enjoyed investigating, the fact that someone had murdered one of her guests was truly appalling. Committing a crime, literally in Myrtle's backyard, was entirely too disrespectful. At least the crime scene tape around her gnomes had vanished with the state police. But the memories from last night were vivid enough to stick around in her head for a while.

While the coffee perked, Miles swiftly moved around the kitchen, putting out sugar, half and half, and even a plate of store-bought muffins. As he moved, he talked, almost to himself.

"It doesn't all add up to me," he said. "The crime was such a random thing. It wasn't as if Luella were misbehaving. She wasn't even doing anything—she was simply sitting at the table and talking with you until she went off for a smoke break. Luella didn't have the opportunity to stir up any trouble or make someone that mad at her."

Myrtle said, "True, but anger against Luella might have been brewing for a while. Maybe someone had been looking for the opportunity to kill her over a period of time."

"But during a Bunco game in a gnome-filled backyard?" Miles looked skeptical.

"Why not? It was perfect timing. Luella was by herself. People were coming and going so much that no one would notice if one person slipped out really quickly." Miles handed Myrtle a coffee cup and she stirred in a couple of teaspoons of sugar.

"Exactly—people were coming and going so much that it would be easy for the killer to be seen returning from the scene of the crime." Miles waved his hand around to emphasize his point, sloshing coffee on his arm in the process.

"But think about it, Miles. Luella was a known smoker. She could be counted on to slip outside and take a break. She clearly knew her killer, so she wasn't going to scream in horror when confronted by them. If the killer couldn't find a handy weapon, she could simply pretend that she'd stepped outside to catch up with Luella and skip the attack," said Myrtle.

"Except there was a handy weapon."

Myrtle raised an eyebrow. "I hope you aren't suggesting that Dusty left his wrench there on purpose. What are you thinking...that Puddin wielded a wrench at Luella White? Whatever for? Because Luella wouldn't hire Puddin as a housekeeper? I can assure you that Puddin and Dusty don't have the mental capacity to be murderers. Besides, Dusty leaves his tools lying around all the time—it's incredibly annoying to me. No, the killer was just lucky. She'd have stepped outside, seen a huge wrench lying around, smacked Luella over the head with it, and then probably rubbed the handle off with her shirt or something to get all the prints off."

"It just seems really brazen to me," muttered Miles before taking a sip of coffee.

"Murder is brazen," said Myrtle. "This was just someone taking advantage of an opportunity. This was someone at my party. Let's figure out who it was. And for the sake of time, let's eliminate each other, okay? And any other women who didn't seem to have much of a connection to Luella."