Cast Iron Cover-Up (The Cast Iron Cooking Mysteries Book 3) Read Online Free Page B

not,” I reminded her.
    “Maybe not, but it doesn’t do us any good assuming that he’s in the hospital, does it? The only way we’re going to be productive here is to work off the premise that someone killed him.”
    “Okay. Let’s say for a moment that’s true. It sounds as though it was clearly a homicide, and I doubt they all did it together. So why did the others leave?”
    “Maybe they don’t know who the real killer is themselves,” Annie suggested.
    “I would think that would be even more reason to call the police instead of packing everything up and getting out of here. If we hadn’t seen evidence to the contrary ourselves, and if the group hadn’t been at the Iron earlier today, there’s a good chance that no one would believe Peggy now. We met the others, at least some of them, so we know that she wasn’t alone, but if Peggy hadn’t shown up and led us here, would we have had any reason to believe that what we’re seeing is anything but what it looks like?”
    “What exactly does it look like?” my twin sister asked me.
    “Like someone went a little crazy with a shovel. There are what, seven holes dug around the perimeter here? I thought they had some kind of map. Do these holes look a little too random to you, too?”
    “Maybe the directions weren’t as clear as Peggy made them sound. If there was room for interpretation, it could easily lead to something like this.”
    “I don’t know. It looks like a lot of trouble to me,” I said.
    “Pat, if Blankenship buried his money somewhere on the property and they managed to unearth it, it could be worth a fortune. I can’t imagine how much his gold and silver would be worth on today’s market.”
    “Then again, it could all just be one big lie,” I told her. “Let’s assume that it’s true, though. There’s no reason to believe that it hasn’t already been found, even if it was ever buried somewhere around here in the first place.”
    “I’m guessing they at least found something,” Annie said.
    “Why do you say that?”
    “If Bones is indeed dead, then someone must have killed him for a reason,” she answered.
    “That’s a good point. Okay, let’s assume that everything Peggy told us was the unvarnished truth. I know Kathleen thinks the girl is high on something, but she didn’t seem that way to me. What did you think?”
    “That she’d seen something traumatic,” Annie said. “Was she under the influence of anything but shock? I don’t think so.”
    “So, we’re agreed on that much, at least. Let’s play out the scenario the way she’s presented it. Peggy leaves to get food, and someone, unknown to the others or not, kills Bones for whatever reason. Maybe he found something of value, or perhaps he pushed one of the other kids a little too far. Either way, he’s in the excavation, either dying or already dead. It’s not unreasonable to believe that no one saw the murder take place. One swing of a pickaxe or a shovel, and Bones falls down into the hole. While it’s not deep enough to bury him, his body could still be obscured from everyone else’s line of sight if they weren’t nearby when it happened.”
    “Then how did the killer get the others to abandon the site?” Annie asked me.
    “I’m not sure. He, or she for that matter, could have told them someone was onto what they were doing out here, so they had to scram, and fast.”
    “How would the killer explain Bones’s absence?”
    “Maybe they claimed he wandered off, and they’d come back for him later. The point is that they got the others to leave, and in a hurry. Once most of the signs of their presence were gone, the murderer must have worried about something he’d left behind that might incriminate him.”
    “Or her,” Annie reminded me.
    “I can’t keep saying ‘him or her,’ and ‘they’ sounds a little clunky. Let’s just agree to call the killer a generic ‘he’ and leave it at that, unless you prefer the female