Ring for Murder (Lighthouse Inn Finale) by Tim Myers

that it could easily vanish.
    His hand shook a little as he opened the
door to the room where Tony had been murdered, but it was less now
than it had been before. He wasn’t exactly getting used to being
there, but at least he could reenter the room without balking at
the threshold.
    Alex looked around the room, took it in, and
then nodded.
    “I was right.”
    “About what?” Mor asked.
    Alex held a hand up to silence his best
friend as he tried to decide if he could use this new information
as a way to trap the real killer.
    Finally, he spoke. “I had it, but it’s
gone.”
    “Don’t worry, it will come to you.”
    Alex shook his head. “But maybe not tonight.
We need to find a way to keep either one of our suspects from
sneaking in here tonight.”
    “I’ll stay here,” Mor said.
    “I can’t ask you to do that,” Alex said.
There was no way he could expect his friend to stay in a room where
a murder had so recently occurred.
    “You’re not asking. I’m volunteering. We can
spring our trap tomorrow night.”
    “What makes you think I’ll be able to come
up with something by then?”
    “However long it takes,” the big man said.
“There’s no time limit on my offer.”
    Alex couldn’t bear the thought of Mor
staying there. “Hang on. Let me think a minute.”
    Mor asked softly, “Would it help if I waited
outside?”
    “Do you mind?”
    “I’ll be on the other side of the door. Call
me if you need me.”
    After he was gone, Alex looked around again.
How could he trap the killer with the coins Mor had so carefully
crafted? There had to be a way, if he could only see it.
    And then it hit him. They were all being too
clever. What mattered was that the murderer got the chance to come
back to the scene of their crime. What if, as crazy as it sounded,
the killer wasn’t really after the coins, but something else? Say
the piece of paper they’d found? Or even something else. There was
only one way to find out. Alex took a towel from the bathroom,
opened it, and tucked Mor’s coins inside, still housed safely in
their bag. After putting the towel back in its place, he walked out
to speak with Mor.
    In a low voice, he said, “You need to go
back to the inn and tell the ladies that I need to be alone. Tell
them I’m going for a long drive and won’t be back tonight. Make it
convincing, and do it loudly enough so that Jackson and Monique can
hear you. I know that you can bellow, so that shouldn’t be a
problem.”
    “What are you going to really be doing?”
    He pointed across the hall at the linen
closet. “I’ll be hiding in there, watching to see what happens.
Leave the main door unlocked when you go. We want to make it easy
on our suspects, and we need them to come in that way,”
    “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
    Alex put a hand on his friend’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t. I’m counting on you to make up for my
absence. Be loud, be funny, and most important, be noticed.”
    “Got it,” Mor said.
    Alex watched his best friend leave, and then
he stepped into the closet. If he moved things around a little, he
could see all the way down the hallway. If someone tried to get
into the room where Tony had been killed, Alex would see it.
    He passed the time remembering the times he
and Tony had in the past. There weren’t a lot of good memories, but
he cherished the ones he had. Tony hadn’t been much of a brother,
but he’d stood up for Alex a few times, and Alex realized that he’d
never thanked his brother for that, at least. And now it was too
late.
    Alex knew that Jackson was supposed to come
while Monique distracted the others. At least that was the theory.
Sure enough, Alex saw the hallway door open, and Jackson walked in
as though he owned the inn. Going straight for the room where Tony
had been killed, Alex waited for him to find the coins. The man was
a real pro, and entered with a blade of some sort in his hand. Alex
pulled back a little and watched him go into