Agony of the Leaves: Tea Shop Mystery #13 Read Online Free Page A

what I’m looking for.”
    Chef Toby nodded.
    “I suppose I should just look around.” Theodosia stood there, her eyes roving the small office, seeing posters, menus tacked on the wall, an old metal restaurant sign that said CRAWDADS SERVED HERE .
    “Maybe start with his desk?” Chef Toby suggested.
    Theodosia plunked herself down in Parker’s chair. She pulled open the top drawer and found the usual mishmash ofguy clutter. Pens, stamps, ahalf-eaten Snickers bar, business cards, loose change, ticket stubs for a Stingrays game last winter.
    “Who’s going to run the restaurant now?” Chef Toby wondered.
    Theodosia looked up. “I don’t know? Parker’s brother?” Parker’s brother, Charles Scully, lived right here in Charleston, somewhere over near Meeting and Broad. She figured he was probably the heir or beneficiary or whatever the legal descriptor was.
    Theodosia pulled open the rest of the drawers. Nothing. An old Sony Walkman, a pocketknife, half-used yellow legal pads, and two blue plastic binders, which proved to be empty.
    The top of Parker’s desk was fairly neat. Pen and pencil set. A few stray papers, mostly supplier invoices. A sign that said I F YOU WANT TO MAKE A MILLION, START WITH $900, 000 . And afour-year-old iMac computer.
    Theodosia tapped a finger against the keyboard. “Did he use this much?”
    Chef Toby shook his head. “Hardly ever. He was a jot-it-down-on-paper kind of guy.”
    “My impression, too.” Theodosia spun the chair around, almost knocking her knees against an old green metalfour-drawer file cabinet. Testing the top drawer, she found it was locked.
    “Do you have a key to this file cabinet?”
    “No. I didn’t even know it was locked.”
    “He didn’t usually lock it?”
    Chef Toby looked thoughtful. “Parker was a pretty trusting guy. The only thing he was extremely mindful about was the cooler. We serve a lot of seafood here, and you know how expensive that stuff is. Costs an arm and a leg these days. So he was always telling us to keep it locked. In any restaurant there’s always a bit of what you’d call…lateral transfer.” He sighed. “But the file cabinet…I’ve got no idea.”
    Theodosia considered this. Maybe, if she could tiptoe through Parker’s files, there might be some little nit or nat that would point her in the right direction. Maybe. That was, if she wasn’t making a mountain out of a molehill. If Parker really
had
just fallen into that enormous fish tank and drowned.
    Her eyes roved across the top of his desk and landed on a ceramic mug with a pinched face sculpted into the side, the kind of mug amateur potters sell at street fairs. She reached out, tipped over the mug, and was shocked when she detected a tinkle of metal against clay and an actual key slid out into her hand. But closer inspection revealed that it was a large brass key, way too large to fit the lock on the file cabinet.
    “Back to square one,” Theodosia sighed.
    “Got an idea,” said Chef Toby. He grabbed a metal letter opener off the desk and stuck the tip of it into the lock. Then he proceeded to wiggle it back and forth, very gently.
    “If you do that, if you force the lock or leave marks, the police are going to know we broke in here,” Theodosia told him. Part of her wanted the file cabinet open; part of her feared they might be tampering with evidence. Which was never a good thing in the eyes of Detective Tidwell. “So maybe you should…be careful.”
    Chef Toby poked and prodded for a few moments, picking and probing with just the tip of the letter opener. “There’s a little metal tongue here and I think if I…”
    A metallic
pop
finished his sentence.
    “Holy buckets,” said Theodosia, a little in awe of hislock-picking skills. “You did it!”
    Chef Toby slid the top file drawer open with aself-satisfied smile. “And without breaking the lock.”
    Theodosia leaned forward anxiously and let her fingertips fly across the tops of the plastic file tabs.