The Butler Didn't Do It (A Maddox Storm Mystery Book 2) by Claire Robyns Page A

her dead?”
    “Not me, my dear.” Miss Crawley sipped her tea, approved the blend with the tiniest nod. “Charles mentioned that Lydia had come to him only last month, distraught over what she’d discovered about her husband.”
    “Another woman,” I concluded.
    “Oh, no, not at all,” Miss Crawley twittered.
    I shrugged and revised that with, “Another man?”
    “Worse, my dear.”
    I thought about that and came up blank. “Okay, so what had she discovered?”
    “He started keeping odd hours, lying about where he’d been,” Miss Crawley declared. “So Lydia decided to do a little snooping. The poor woman suspected it was just an affair.”
    “There’s no such thing as just an affair,” I muttered.
    “And rightly so.” She patted my hand. “But smuggling Asian artifacts is a criminal offense.”
    Alarms went off inside my head. A black market smuggler! “Mr Fieldman is currently in Turkey on a dig. You don’t think…?”
    I swallowed the accusation as I remembered he was also a philanthropist. That conjured up images of benevolent old men with spare money to give away, not hard-hearted criminals with greedy morals.
    I frowned at Miss Crawley. “You don’t think he was maybe just bringing the artifacts home for safekeeping?”
    “Lydia didn’t think so. She followed him a few times to an abandoned warehouse and after that, well, she set up surveillance in the house.” Miss Crawley sipped her tea while I digested that. “She uncovered a secret bank account and a hidden safe she’d never known about. That’s when she brought her suspicions to Charles.”
    “What did she expect Charles to do about it?”
    Miss Crawley gave a delicate shrug. “She’d known him since she was a child, so perhaps she considered him a fatherly figure. If she was looking for advice, she certainly got it. Charles insisted she had to go to the cops.”
    “And did she?”
    As if he could feel his ears burning, Charles Sitter strolled in from the terrace. My cheeks reddened with guilt, although goodness knows why. It was Miss Crawley doing all the tattling.
    Jack intercepted his approach and Miss Crawley took the opportunity to tilt toward me and whisper, “Charles didn’t say, but what if she confronted her husband first? Perhaps even gave him an ultimatum to stop his criminal activities or she would rat him out?”
    I slumped back in the sofa. “That all sounds plausible, except her husband’s in another country and how on earth would he have…” stolen my prop rope? I caught that slip just in time, assuming it wasn’t general knowledge.
    “Sit up straight, my dear,” Miss Crawley reprimanded. “And being out of the country is no excuse. Isn’t that what hired hitmen are for?”
    I jerked upright. A cold-blooded murderer in my home was one thing. A professional assassin was another matter altogether. Then again, I supposed that meant we were all safe from being picked off randomly.
    Unless Mr Fieldman had bought a package deal.
    Jonas returned from his adventure and I lowered my head, sizing him up out the corner of my eye. What was an accountant doing with tanned, leathery skin? He wasn’t a big man, but he was solid with the kind of muscle tone you didn’t get sitting behind a desk all day.
    The library door opened, interrupting my suspect analysis. Julie Brown was ushered out and, seeing as Jonas was the closest, Nate called him in.
    I turned my suspicions on the big-haired woman as she came to join our tea party, but I couldn’t see it. If a woman was the assassin, my bets were on the victim. After all, Lydia Fieldman had been the one who’d camouflaged her true appearance.
    “How well did you know Lydia?” I asked her.
    Julie took a good while to answer, a faraway look in her eyes, but when she did her voice was filled with emotion. “Since she was a child. Her mother used to bring her to the GRIMMS annual picnic.” She sighed, shook her head sadly. “And then she became a member in her own