Feta Attraction by Susannah Hardy Page A

tonight.”
    â€œThank you, Georgie. You are a good girl.” Spiro and Cal were her reason for living. I hoped I rated in there somewhere too.
    â€œI’ll find him.” I had no idea how to go about doing that. The smartest thing, of course, would be to take my suspicions to the police. First, though, I needed to look at that phone. If there was nothing more sinister than Spiro off on a shopping spree, I did not want to get the authorities involved. Under the best of circumstances, living in a village like Bonaparte Bay was like living in a fishbowl. I wouldn’t subject Sophie to the resultant gossip if I could help it.
    We descended the stairs and she headed for the kitchen. I went into my office and shuffled the papers around.
    I opened up all the desk drawers, a rising sense of foreboding speeding up my movements. I got down on my hands and knees and looked under the desk, then pawed through the trash can. I felt around in my purse, and in every pocket. Spiro’s cell phone was gone.

SIX
    I left Sophie supervising Russ and Dolly in the kitchen and took a walk down Theresa Street toward the docks. Midge was setting out racks of bright-colored clothes in front of the T-Shirt Emporium. She called out to me, but I merely waved and smiled as I went by. I did not want to be answering any questions about anything.
    Before I left I put in a phone call to the state police. The dispatcher said that someone would call me back when the cruisers came back in from their rounds. Standard operating procedure in a village this size. My thoughts returned to the missing cell phone. There had been exactly five people in the Bonaparte House this morning, including me. I could think of no reason Sophie, Dolly, or Russ would snoop in my office. As far as I knew, I was the only one who’d seen the phone, so how would they know what to look for even if they did snoop? That left the Coast Guard guy. What had he called himself? Captain Jack. While he was charming me and I’d been staring at his broad chest and wondering what kind of six-pack he had under that shirt, could he have somehow found and pocketed the phone?
    I passed the Sailor’s Rest. A sign on the front door indicated that the restaurant was “Closed for Remodeling.”
    Would the Rest open again at all this summer now that Big Dom was dead? Sophie would certainly be happy if it didn’t. I wouldn’t put it past her to put her own sign underneath the “Closed” sign that read, “Try the Bonaparte House!” with an arrow pointing up the street. I did feel some sympathy for the staff, who wouldn’t be able to get in enough weeks to receive their winter unemployment checks if the place didn’t reopen. Big Dom hadn’t been married—at least there was no wife in town—but he might have had some grown kids. Hopefully the heirs would get the place up and running again as soon as possible, or do the right thing by the employees. I supposed we might take a couple on at the Bonaparte House, but we certainly couldn’t accommodate everyone.
    I continued on down past the Express-o Bean and debated stopping in for a cappuccino, but decided against it. I crossed Theresa Street at the Thompson Street intersection (virtually no traffic at this time of the morning) and walked the few yards to the Tat-L-Tails Tattoo Salon.
    The door was open and I walked in to the music of some tuned door chimes. Jim Morrison stared down at me, shirtless, druggy, and sexy, from a poster on the wall to my left. Tie-dyed T-shirts and leather vests hung on a rack underneath. The other wall was covered with pictures of diverse tattooed body parts, designs that could be chosen or samples of Inky’s work, and a framed New York State tattooing license issued to Ignatius LaFontaine. The front display case was filled with bongs and pipes and clips and rings and chains of varying size and some other hardware whose use I could not identify, nor