“Heavens, no,” Sheila answered. “We don’t keep our trash. Out it goes right away with the recycling to the dump.”
Sheila was as ruthlessly efficient as I was. I hoped I didn’t resemble her in other ways. The conversation was getting me nowhere. I tried one last question. “I noticed as the evening went on, you were chatting with the other couples. Are you friends or acquaintances of the Bennetts, the Caswells, or the Walkers?”
“Certainly not,” Sheila answered. “It was just . . . we were all stuck there . . . and, well, one has to be polite.”
Michael walked me to the door and said good-bye. I climbed down the wide steps and continued out to the sidewalk. When I turned and looked back at the Fogged Inn, he stood, long white lion’s mane surrounding his face, framed by the window in the door, watching me go.
Chapter 13
I walked back down Main Street, chewing on what I’d learned. Which was to say, nothing new, except that I hoped I’d never spend the night in a B&B like the Fogged Inn. If the beds were as uncomfortable as the chairs, it would be like spending a night on the rack.
On the way past the police station, I noticed Lieutenant Binder’s official car in the parking lot. I pushed open the heavy glass door to the building and stepped inside.
“Is he in?” I asked the civilian receptionist, tilting my head toward the door of the large multipurpose room that Binder and Flynn used when they were in town.
“On the phone.”
“I’ll wait.” Through the door I heard the low rumble of a male voice, and then silence as he listened to the person on the other end. Then the voice spoke again.
The voice stopped and the receptionist glanced at the lights on her console. “You can go in now,” she directed.
Binder sat, laptop open, behind a folding table set up to accommodate the state cops on a temporary basis. “Well, speak of the devil and she appears.” He stood and gestured to the folding chair across from him.
“What does that mean?”
“I just got off the phone with one of your many fans. You’ve been bothering people with questions about the man who died in your walk-in.”
Phil Bennett. It had to be. He’d warned me off Deborah and then he’d called Binder to complain.
“Who was it?” As if I didn’t know.
“I’d rather not say. What are you up to? It alarms me you’ve bothered so many people, you can’t figure out which of them complained.” He let that sink in. “Anyway, what brings you in?”
“Jamie—Officer Dawes—said the autopsy was this morning. Any results?”
“If I tell you, will you stop pestering folks and let us do our job?”
I didn’t respond. That depended in large part on how this conversation went.
Binder sighed. “The initial screens are back. That was the ME on the phone just now. Our victim had enough diazepam in his system to subdue him but not enough to kill him.” Diazepam was the generic name for Valium, I knew from my little-used prescription.
“Were there any signs of sedatives in his room?” Jamie had said the search at the Snuggles turned up no drugs.
“Not in his room at the inn. Not on his person.”
“So someone might have given him the sedative in order to subdue him, so they could then give him the injection?”
“That’s the theory. Now we wait for more test results, to see what he might have been injected with.”
Phil Bennett had told me Deborah took medication for panic attacks. Did the police know about this? That brought me up short. Did I actually suspect that one of the diners was a murderer? Not really, was the answer. But I was certain, based on the gift certificates, that someone had brought those specific eight people to the restaurant that night. Why, or what the connection was to the murder, I didn’t know, but I thought it was worth finding out.
“What did the medical examiner say about the dead man’s scar?” I asked.
“She thinks whatever caused it happened a long time ago, when he was a kid. To try to find information about a kid injured like that, years ago, when we have no idea what part of the country . . . Doesn’t make sense.” Binder shook his head. “If he’s a legit guy, with a job and a wife or a girlfriend or kids, someone will report him missing. Then the scar will make it easier to be sure he’s a match.”
“And if he’s not a ‘legit guy’?”
“Then some law enforcement agency somewhere will have run into him. Did he have an accent?”
“No. Not a Maine accent, not a foreign accent.”
Binder shifted in his seat. “Okay, I’ve told you what I know. Time for you to tell me what you’ve been doing.”
I hesitated for a moment, wondering where to start. Binder had known me for a while now. There was not much chance that he’d think I was crazy, but I had a slightly crazy tale to tell.