Murder Most Convenient: A Mrs. Xavier Stayton Mystery by Robert Colton

habit of mine. Rarely did I chew on a clove unless melancholy or perturbed.
      After a moment of silence, Phyllis asked, “Why do you chew on them? Do they taste good?”
      I could have ended the inquiry by agreeing with the woman’s suggestion. However, there was something about Phyllis that told me she would recognize a lie.
       “My husband chewed them; it was how his governess broke him of biting his nails. He never gave them up.” I reached into my handbag and pulled out a little silver monogrammed snuffbox that had belonged to him to show the woman. “The taste is both sweet and spicy and was always on his breath. When I chew one, it reminds me of his kiss.”
       Phyllis reached out with her good hand and patted my arm. This action surprised me.
      Blushing from sharing something so intimate, I said, “I beg your pardon, I shouldn’t have said—”
      “Now, don’t be a silly fool with me like you are with the Staytons.” She paused, and a genuine smile cracked her ridged exterior. “He was a very fortunate young man to have found such a love in his short life.”
       I wasn’t sure what to say.
       “Despite your misfortune, you are a happy girl, as you should be. There is nothing wrong with that. Don’t think the air at Pearce Manor is normal—it isn’t.”
       I gave her a nervous smile and glanced to see that the little window between us and the driver was closed. Phyllis noticed this and said, “Oh, let him be damned for what he thinks. Now, light my cigarette.” 
     
       The vicar’s wife was, in fact, an absolute bore. A small woman with nervous fingers and darting eyes, she looked like a librarian just itching to shush someone. She served a strange medley of what might have been two evenings worth of leftovers. My American tongue had taken well enough to the food in London, but the country cuisine offered to me went down rather slowly.
      From the get-go, she told me she understood that I was collecting information for a whodunit. Proudly, she pointed at stack of books, and named authors such as Emilie Gaboriau, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charles Dickens among her favorites.
       Phyllis reached for the woman’s copy of Great Expectations and said, “I’ll give you there’s some mystery to this one, but I dare say it isn’t a whodunit.”
       Our host seemed uncomfortable with Phyllis. “Do you like that book, Miss Masterson?” she asked, rather cautiously.
       “I find some of the passages speak to me,” Phyllis said, and then she quoted, “In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew was right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.”
       Not sure what to make of Phyllis’s comment, the vicar’s wife invited us inside her cramped dining room, and we suffered through her meal. (The woman did provide me with many interesting facts about the locals, kindly omitting their names, of course. For the sake of pacing, I shall jump over all this; it seems after nearly fifty pages typed, we haven’t a crime, victim, or suspects. Lucy reminds me it is preferred that the murder takes place earlier in the manuscript, so I will be agreeable to the insight of an editor to make alterations. That being stated, I’m not fond of the stories where you come in at the murder and then digress back to what leads up to the crime.)
       Running out of gossip, our hostess offered us what she called freshly baked pie. Phyllis rose from the table and said, “I will pass. I need a cigarette.” She held out her good arm and waved at the vicar’s wife. “Yes, I know that you are allergic. I’ll go out to the garden.”
       “Asthma and all,” the little woman told me. I could not help but notice that her spirits lightened once Phyllis was away.
       I had just stuck my fork into the piece of pie that had been served to me already cut and on a plate, not sliced from a warm pan for me to see, when my hostess’s voice dropped to the tone of a