Murder on the Candlelight Tour by Ellen Elizabeth Hunter

Maybe's there's nothing to worry about. Let me do some checking. How about dessert?"
    I brightened. "I'll have the Caribbean fudge pie. With ice cream."
    For a moment I was transported back to childhood. On hot summer afternoons, we made ice cream in our shady garden, cooled by breezes off the Waterway that rustled the centuries-old live oaks. Melanie and I took turns helping Daddy turn the hand crank, which became less and less yielding as the ice cream hardened, while Mama scooped handfuls of ice cubes into the stainless steel canister. At memories like this, I miss my parents so much the loss feels like a knife slicing through my gut. My daddy died the first Christmas I was in college. Gone to heaven, I tell myself. Mama is with me in body only. But I am grateful for her corporeal self.
     

 
     
     
     
    13
     
    They tell me I'm an alcoholic but I don't believe them. Sure, Lucy Lou and I like our cocktails. Without them, how could I have put up with Sheldon for all those years? Lu Lou and I can quit anytime we like.
    Thus wrote MaeMae Mackie in her last journal entry on Tuesday, December 4th, the day of Sheldon's viewing. I continued reading.
    If I hadn't married Sheldon, how different my life would have been. I might have become a successful decorator in my own right. He stole my ideas and took credit for them. I've got more talent in my pinkie finger than that big jerk had in his whole body. Oh, I hate him, hate him, hate him, and I'm glad he's dead!
    Whew! This was heavy stuff. I slammed the diary shut. Still she hadn't admitted to killing him. But would she make a written confession?
    I was snug in my bed. Then I thought it might be a good idea for me to record my impressions so I jumped out of bed and grabbed a legal pad and pen from my desk. Systematically, I wrote down the information I had gathered.
    On the first sheet, I drew the layout of my house. The library--or the crime scene as it has come to be known--is situated on the east side of the house in the rear, off the back hallway. The hallway is connected to the front reception hall, and opens into the dining room on the west side, and the back staircase. The back staircase meets the front staircase on a landing, then a single flight of stairs carries one to the second floor.
    The hallway angles around the library and leads to the side door that opens into the porte cochere.
    At the far rear of the house is the kitchen. It's set off by a fire wall in a one-story wing. I am grateful for prudent nineteenth-century builders.
    The parlor and dining room are both located on the west side of the house and are connected by a large, arched opening.
    I marked an "X" in the center of the library where Sheldon's body had lain.
    Although the tour route through my house had brought visitors in the front door and exited them out the side door into the porte cochere, with a hundred tourists or more inside my house at any given time, it was entirely possible that the murderer had slipped in through the side door where he mingled with the crowd. Who would have known? Then he'd waited his chance to find Sheldon alone in the library. But no. It was Binkie who'd been posted in the library. Anyone looking for Sheldon would have expected to find him in the dining room.
    Don't go jumping to conclusions, Wilkes, I admonished myself. What if the murderer didn't know what Sheldon or Binkie looked like? What if he possessed only a general description? What if, for some unfathomable reason, someone had sneaked into the library to kill Binkie, but finding another mature, gray-haired man there, killed him instead? A case of mistaken identity. Sheldon not the intended victim. but no, that didn't make sense, not even to my overwrought imagination. For who would want to kill dear, gentle Binkie?
    Was it mere coincidence that Sheldon was in the library at the time of his murder? Or had he gone there to meet someone? Had he required a private place to speak to someone--MaeMae, for