Murder Most Fowl by Edith Maxwell

high school teacher. Did you know that?”
    â€œI didn’t even know you were a teacher,” Cam said. She stopped seeding and looked over at Felicity. “You don’t still teach, do you? You always seem to have time for Volunteer Wednesdays.”
    â€œI took an early retirement package three years ago. But I taught English at Westbury High for more than three decades. Wayne was in one of my first classes. He and Paul Underwood.”
    â€œInteresting. I was wondering how old Wayne was.”
    Felicity stopped, too, and narrowed her eyes at Cam. “Let’s see. They were juniors, so about sixteen, seventeen. And I was twenty-four. I’m sixty now, so that makes Wayne fifty-two or so, right? Paul, too.” She resumed work, setting a finished flat aside and starting a new one. “Those two, Paul and Wayne.” She made a tsking noise.
    â€œWere they friends?”
    â€œThey were, and then they weren’t. Never really understood what happened between them. Paul was the rowdier . . . no, not rowdy. It was more so like he was unscrupulous. And you know Wayne, he always took the ethical high ground.”
    â€œDid Paul cheat on a test or something?” Cam asked.
    â€œNot in my class, he didn’t.” Felicity whistled. “I may look like a nice older lady, Cam, but I was a tough teacher. Nothing slipped past me.” She beamed one of her sweet smiles, which did, in fact, make her look like a nice older lady.
    â€œThat seems like Wayne, to take the morally right path. It’s even more ironic, then, that someone took the lowest and killed him.”
    Felicity shuddered. “Who would have killed a nice man like Wayne?”
    Â 
    Cam eased herself into the chair in front of her computer two hours later. Dasha wandered over and sat on the floor next to her, while Preston watched them both from the couch. With Felicity’s help she’d seeded over six hundred tomatoes, which would yield big red slicers, small gold orbs, dry-fleshed oblongs for sauce, early medium-sized reds, and the delectable Black Prince. She and Felicity had chatted as they worked, but she hadn’t learned anything else about Wayne. Or about Paul. Cam remembered seeing him driving away from Wayne’s as she’d arrived the day before, and he hadn’t looked happy. Too bad Felicity didn’t know what the two boys’ falling out had been about.
    She ought to be out pruning the blueberry bushes and her antique apple tree, but she was tired. She could do that tomorrow, as long as it was before the weather warmed up for good. Felicity had suggested they call the Laitinen house and offer to help out with end-of-day chores. Cam had agreed, even though she should be doing her own chores. She’d called and talked to Megan, who said she’d be happy for help in the hen house. Surely the police wouldn’t mind if they stayed in the chicken house and the barn. She took a bite of the cheese sandwich she’d fixed, then pulled up the Wicked Local news site, which already had a story about Wayne’s death. Munching, she scrolled slowly through, then stopped.
    â€œLocal resident Paul Underwood discovered Laitinen’s body this morning. Underwood is being questioned by authorities.”
    Cam leaned back in her chair. What was Paul doing over at the poultry farm again this morning? Could it be connected to whatever had happened decades earlier? She glanced at the time in the corner of the monitor. Three-thirty. She had forty minutes before she needed to pick up Felicity, time enough to dive into Google and see what she could find out. She sat up again.
    Thirty-four years earlier. A time of big lapels and shoulder pads. Of men still sporting the longer hair of the decade before, but now adding a gold chain around their neck. Of tight economic times, disco dancing, and Pac-Man. Two years before her own birth. Cam shook her head. She needed to go local if she was going to