Plaster and Poison by Jennie Bentley Page A

her that there would be no more dinners with her dad, Friday or anytime.
“Did he ever ask you about it?” Wayne asked gently. “The carriage house? What was going on there? Whether anyone lived in it? Anything like that?”
Shannon shook her head. “He mostly talked about him and Mom, when they were young. And me, when I was a baby. About how he always wished they’d been able to work things out between them, but they were just too young when they met. Although to hear him tell it, Mom was the love of his life.” She avoided looking at Kate as well as Wayne when she said it.
“Love, my left buttock,” Kate spat.
Shannon’s pretty face crumpled, her lips quivering, and her mother reached out to her, voice softening. “Honey, I’m sorry. I don’t want to upset you any more than the news has already. But the truth is that when I met your dad, I was eighteen and stupid. He was twenty and slick. I thought I loved him. I thought he loved me back. He said he did. But when I got pregnant with you and turned to him for help, he left me to handle it all on my own. So don’t talk to me about the love of Gerard’s life. If he has one, it’s Gerard himself.”
“He loved me ,” Shannon whispered.
Kate looked like she wished she could kick herself. Hard. “Of course he did, honey. I didn’t mean that he didn’t love you .” She looked up at Wayne, helplessly, as Shannon dissolved into tears. Josh twitched.
It was at this pivotal moment that we heard the sound of another car pulling into the driveway outside. Two doors slammed and two sets of footsteps made their way through the slush and snow to the back door. A light knock heralded the arrival of a small figure in a royal blue coat, who looked around the kitchen for a second until her pair of blue eyes lighted on me.
“Avery!”
My mom had arrived.
    8

    The group broke up after that. Josh escorted Shannon into her room down the hall, where we could hear their voices through the wall, murmuring low. They were best friends in addition to the small matter of him being in love with her, so he might help her more at the moment than even her mother, especially given Kate’s conflicted feelings about Gerard.
Kate introduced Wayne to my mom and Noel—as her fiancé, who just happened to be the chief of police, but with no mention of the fact that a suspicious death had taken place on the premises overnight and that was why he was here. After making the appropriate noises, Wayne excused himself. Kate took Mom and me upstairs to the suite while Derek and Noel trotted back outside to unload the car.
The rooms in Kate’s B&B are named for the members of the Cabot family. None of the Cabots ever lived in the house, except for Anna Virginia, after she married Lawrence Ritter and ceased to be a Cabot. But as Kate once explained to me, the Cabots were a Waterfield institution and it seemed the appropriate thing to do. There is Captain Cabot’s room; John Cabot was a sea captain back in the day, and so was his father. There is Mrs. Mary’s room, Anna Virginia’s room, and John Andrew’s room, and then there’s the Widow’s Walk: the suite taking up the entire third floor. That’s where Mom and Noel would be staying.
Back in the day, the suite had been the smallest of the three apartments in Helen Ritter’s house. Back then, it had consisted of a kitchen, a living room/bedroom, and a tiny bath. Now, most of the walls had been removed, and except for the bathroom—which was the old kitchen—the suite was one big room, with windows on three sides. Because the B&B sits up high, it’s possible to see not only most of Waterfield Village from the windows, but also the harbor and the ocean. The view is better in the summer, when the trees are green and the sun shines on the water, but it was still pretty impressive now, in spite of being monochromatically white and gray. The furniture is Victorian and dark, the king-sized bed has corner posts and a canopy, and there’s a sitting area with a TV off to one side, as