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Alice Brooks. Heart attack, most likely. Or maybe pneumonia. Pneumonia could take an old person fast. One minute they had the sniffles, next they were pushing up daisies.
    She wondered if she ought to do something. If Alice was in the ambulance, that son-in-law of hers could tell Wanda what was up. But if it was Herb…
    She’d seen Herb last week when she made Key lime pie. She’d grown up in the “real” Keys, and she knew what a real pie tasted like. None of those grocery store crusts in tin foil pans. She made her own, like her mama had, crushing the best graham crackers she could buy, mixing the crumbs with melted butter, real butter, not some diet substitute. Then squeezing her own limes—Key limes, of course. What point was there to making a Key lime pie with Persian limes? Who ate Persian lime pie? Nobody who would admit it.
    She had her very own secret, also learned from her mama. She grated a fine layer of lime rind on top of the crust before the filling went in; then she garnished the finished product with cream she whipped herself and a few curls of dark chocolate, along with thin slices of lime. When her son got married, he had asked her to make a dozen pies for the wedding reception instead of a cake, and they’d built a special tiered stand to hold them, with a plastic bride and groom at the top in shorts and flowered shirts. Of course the bride wore a veil and the groom a top hat, just so people would understand.
    She realized she was standing at the door thinkingabout pie when she ought to be thinking about Herb or Alice.
    Nope, cancel the Alice part. Wanda caught a glimpse of Alice’s silver hair just in front of her cottage, then the granddaughter who had taken up residence at her side. As she watched, they both went inside.
    “Herb, then.”
    She was sorry if Herb was heading to the hospital or worse about now. And sorry, too, that on the day she’d made that Key lime pie, she’d eaten almost half of it in one sitting. Then, in a fit of anger, because even though it was his day off, Ken hadn’t come home to share it, she had wrapped up the rest, plunked it in her best ceramic pie pan—the one with the top that looked like crisscrossed strips of dough with an apple slice for a handle—and marched down to Herb’s house. He was puttering with those plants of his, and she’d handed the whole thing right over to him, just because she didn’t want Ken to have even a single bite if he ever came home again.
    Now her very best pie pan, given to her by her daughter—who was not usually the best shopper—was at Herb’s cottage. She sure hoped he hadn’t been struck dead from an overdose of Key lime pie.
    She had to do something about this mess. That pie pan was hers, and she had to get it back. Wanda went inside to finish her breakfast and figure out just how to do it, and when.
     
    Before she locked the house behind her, Tracy retried the key that Maribel Sessions, the Realtor, had given her for Herb’s cottage. She hadn’t simply imagined the key didn’t fit. It didn’t. She hadn’t found a similar one lying around the house, either, not on his dresser or bedside stand.
    Although the one Herb had been holding when he died didn’t look anything like the one she’d been given, she tried it now. As she’d guessed, it had been made for a different kind of lock. Thin and spidery, it looked like something out of a Nancy Drew novel: The Secret of the Dead Man’s Key . If Tracy had a mysterious garret or a tower to unlock, she might be in business.
    Once she got home, she called Maribel, who handled leasing the cottages, and Maribel promised to give her the originals if Tracy hurried over before she left for the day. With the promise of a key that actually fit, Tracy went back and locked Herb’s doors, and took off for town. If worse came to worse, she could slit a screen and climb through a window to get back in.
    To Tracy, Palmetto Grove always seemed a few shades paler than it ought to.