Chow Down (A Melanie Travis Mystery)

particular person.”
    Welcome to the club, I thought. I put on my turn signal, pulled through a break in the oncoming traffic, and drove up into the parking lot. There was time for just one more question.
    “Why Larry?” I asked.
    “Pardon me?”
    “If the murder was related to the contest, if it was meant to influence its outcome, why was Larry the finalist who was targeted? All five of us have a shot at winning. So why would someone go after only Yoda? What made the murderer believe that she was the strongest contestant?”
    For a minute I didn’t think Lisa was going answer. We’d reached the train station, after all. I half-expected Lisa to retrieve Yoda from the back seat and scramble from the car. But she didn’t.
    I slid the Volvo into an empty parking space, and turned off the ignition. Then we both sat in silence.
    “I’m not proud of this,” she said finally. “But you have to understand the desperation I felt. It led me to make some decisions I might not otherwise have made.”
    “Go on.”
    “It was also Simone’s idea, though I’m not blaming her for a minute. I agreed to go along.”
    It occurred to me I might have gray hair before I found out what we were talking about. “With what?”
    “Chow Down has been in development for more than a year, and during that time Simone was the one who came up with a brilliant idea to promote the new product launch. Champions would hold a contest that would draw entries and attention from all over the country. The publicity it would generate would be well worth the hundred thousand–dollar prize. She took the idea to Doug and it was approved.”
    Lisa’s voice faltered briefly. When she spoke again, it was with renewed determination. “Then Simone came to me, her oldest friend, and also a woman who was struggling with a husband she no longer loved and a marriage she didn’t know how to get out of.”
    “Simone recommended that you to enter the contest.”
    “She did more than that.”
    The lightbulb went on. I should have seen this sooner.
    “She promised you that Yoda would win, didn’t she?”
    “There didn’t seem to be any harm in the idea.” Lisa’s words came tumbling out in a rush. “After all, the contest was going to be a boon to the company. And Yoda would make an excellent spokesdog for the product. So we weren’t stealing anything, we were just manipulating some results. It wasn’t as if anybody would be hurt by what we were doing.”
    Nobody except the thousands of other hopeful contestants who had written essays and taken pictures, and entered the contest in good faith. And maybe me . . . who’d apparently devoted half my summer to a competition that had been rigged right from the start.
    “Did Larry know about that?” I asked.
    “No, of course not. I certainly couldn’t explain what I needed the money for. I told him about the contest after I’d already entered it. He thought Yoda was chosen to be a finalist in the same way all the others were.”
    But someone must have known that the little Yorkie was slated to win. Someone who had lured Larry into the stairwell for a clandestine meeting.
    “Who else did Simone tell?” I asked.
    “I don’t know. I never had any idea how she made the arrangements. Simone just told me that everything was all set and that ensuring the correct outcome would not be a problem.”
    Except that, as things turned out, she couldn’t have been more wrong.
    “So what happens now?” I asked.
    Lisa shrugged. “We go to the press conference tomorrow. The judges announce the winner. And Chow Down has a new spokesdog.”
    “Yoda?”
    “I have no idea anymore,” Lisa said. She sounded unbearably weary. “At this point, I just want it all to be over.”

    Lisa wasn’t the only one who wanted the whole thing to be finished. I was tired of running around participating in events that I now knew had been all but meaningless. The summer was slipping by, and I’d hardly had a chance to stop and enjoy any of it.
    When Faith and I arrived home, I discovered that Sam and Davey had been making plans. They’d decided to hold a cookout and they’d invited Aunt Peg, Bob, Frank, Bertie, and Maggie to join us.
    I should have been elated at the prospect of a family gathering. And I would have been, if only I hadn’t felt so thoroughly enervated.
    That was what getting up and starting the day before dawn did to a person, I told myself. But secretly I was hoping there was another reason for my lack