I was walking out the door, car keys in my hand, when a complication hit me.

“I’ll need to take your car,” I said.

“Why?” Rob was still a little protective of his latest automotive toy, a Porsche convertible that had yet to acquire its first real scratch.

“What if something happens and you need to take Timmy someplace?” I said. “Like to the emergency room?”

“He can ride in the Porsche.”

“It doesn’t have a back seat to put the car seat in,” I said. “And trust me, even if it did, you wouldn’t want Timmy riding in your Porsche.”

Rob digested that for a moment.

“Yeah, but what are the chances I’ll actually have to take him to the ER?”

“Slim,” I said. “So what does it matter if you’re staying home with an aging tin can or a brand new race car in the driveway?”

He eventually gave way to common sense, but he was still sulking when I drove off. Or maybe just worrying about whether I could drive his car.

I had to admit, the Porsche was quite a change from my reliable but aging Toyota. And after two days of driving around with a car seat in the back, feeling as if I spent more time looking in the rearview mirror at Timmy than at the road ahead, being in the car alone would have been exhilarating all by itself. Throw in the sense of power and freedom of driving a hot car with no roof—well, I found myself playing fast and loose with the speed limit on one long open stretch. Fortunately I had slowed to a relatively sedate five miles above the speed limit by the time I passed Chief Burke, stopped by the side of the road, apparently talking on his cell phone.

Looking in the rearview mirror, I thought I saw him frowning at me, though his face disappeared in the distance too soon to really tell.

Well, a frown was normal for Chief Burke when he was in the middle of an investigation. No particular reason for him to be frowning at me, was there?

I pushed the thought from my mind to enjoy the rest of my drive. And I had to admit, the most beautiful part of it was the last mile, from the gate of the Caerphilly Inn to the hotel’s wisteria-draped front door. The rest of the county was looking a little bare and baked by a long, hot, dry summer, but the Inn’s driveway was cool and leafy under the overarching shade of the trees on either side, and patches of bright summer flowers appeared at charmingly unpredictable intervals. Now that I’d started to try my hand at gardening, I had gained a new appreciation for how expensive and labor-intensive the Inn’s low-key landscaping really was.

But I felt a lot less intimidated by the Inn now that my recently discovered grandfather had taken up semipermanent residence there. He terrorized the staff on a regular basis, but they clearly adored him, which either meant that they thought his bark was worse than his bite or that he tipped hugely. Possibly both. At any rate, with Dr. Blake in the picture, I felt a lot less worried these days that they’d do something dire like tow my battered car for dripping oil on the spotless white gravel of their parking lot. The locals debated hotly whether the Inn had its gravel power-washed annually or just replaced it. And of course Rob’s practically new Porsche shouldn’t offend the Inn’s sensibilities at all.