by K. J. Emrick
A Cup of Death
A Moonlight Bay Psychic Mystery Book 9
K. J. Emrick
Kathryn De Winter
First published in Australia by South Coast Publishing, April 2018. Copyright Kathryn De Winter and K.J. Emrick (2017-2018)
* * *
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and locations portrayed in this book and the names herein are fictitious. Any similarity to or identification with the locations, names, characters or history of any person, product or entity is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
- From a Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations.
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Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
More Info
About the Authors
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Chapter 1
After a vacation, a person was supposed to feel rested and relaxed. That was how it was supposed to work. At the moment, Miranda Wylder felt anything but relaxed.
She and her boyfriend Jack had spent a wonderful three-day weekend camping with their good friends Jean-Paul and Sapphire, and their dog Butter, and Kyle of course. Not that Kyle had taken up any space, or used up any supplies, or needed a tent of his own.
Kyle was a ghost.
For a psychic like Miranda, ghosts were a common occurrence in her life. People who died often came looking for someone who could hear them and listen to their troubles. Kyle was special, though. He wasn’t a lost soul. He was her best friend, but so much more than that. It wasn’t every girl who had their very own spirit guide. Kyle never let her forget it, either.
The vacation that all of them had taken together, as much fun as it had been, had ended with a murder mystery that struck a chord with Miranda. It had started with the death of a man, but soon enough it had become tangled up with a very personal family event. Years ago, Miranda’s Aunt Connie had disappeared. At the time, it hadn’t seemed strange for Connie Cleary to go missing. She went off on trips all the time, going where the wind took her. When the days became weeks and then months and then years, and no one heard from her, everyone just assumed she had left everything behind.
Now, Miranda wasn’t so sure it was that simple. Was Connie dead? She didn’t know anymore.
The people involved in the murder at the Blue Jay Bed and Breakfast had known about Connie’s disappearance. They also knew about Miranda’s psychic abilities. Somehow, they had known about it all. It had left her with an unsettled feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Then, when they had gotten home to her family’s estate, Ragged Rest, she and Jack found that someone had broken in and rummaged through her things. Drawers were open, papers were spread everywhere, clothes that should have been neatly folded and put away were lying strewn about her bedroom floor. Someone had definitely been looking for something. Thank God nothing was broken. They’d checked all the doors and windows and found them secure. All they would have to do was clean up the mess inside.
Miranda knew it all had to be connected to her aunt’s disappearance.
But how?
“What on Earth are you doing?” Kyle moved about the kitchen, watching as Miranda did her best to return order to the chaos of her belongings.
“I’m trying to figure out what our intruder was looking for,” she told Kyle. “Which is the same thing I told you fifteen minutes ago.”
“Well, excuse me,” Kyle said dramatically. “Just asking.”
After she put the flour and sugar containers back on the countertop, she went about collecting the pages of an old manuscript that had been taken from their place on the kitchen table and carelessly tossed about. As a writer she had several of those around but putting them back together again was going to be nearly impossible. Even as a best-selling novelist, Miranda had always done all of her own filing and editing. Today she kind of regretted that.
Page forty-three was missing. Pages twelve through nineteen were tucked in behind page one-oh-two. This was the novel she had completed for the company last year, the one that hadn’t climbed the best seller list like her publishing house had hoped. Her next one needed to do better.
Turning a group of pages the right way up, she shuffled them into place.
“Well, I’d help you do that,” Kyle said to her, “but… well, you know. The whole ghost thing.”
He wiggled his transparent fingers, all misty and blue, to demonstrate his incorporeal state of being. Kyle had gotten better at the whole touching and moving things. A pencil was his specialty, rolling it or spinning it in circles or even signing his name. He could drag chairs across a floor. He could push small objects. He’d been able to physically move Miranda, just a step or two, but he’d explained to her several times that was only because of their connection. He’d also been able to open a door while they were in the Blue Jay Bed and Breakfast. So his skills were strengthening. But this mess here would have taken him a month of Sundays to clear up.
Miranda gave him half a smile, because her attention was still focused on the papers in front of her. It was bad enough that she had to reconstruct several different manuscripts, but now it turned out that there were papers mixed in that weren’t even from her stories. These over here were bills that she had kept carefully sorted in a drawer. These over here were printouts from travel websites for places she hoped to go someday. These ones here were…
Oh, my.
“I think this is what our intruder was looking for,” she said, nearly breathless with the thought of it.
Miranda hooked strands of her deep red hair back behind her ear, kneeling there on her kitchen floor, scanning pag
e after page as she found them and picked them up. She hadn’t had time to change out of her jeans and t-shirt, or even take a shower, but she didn’t care about any of that now. These papers, right here… this was it.
This was the start of a whole new mystery right here in her hand.
Kyle looked over her shoulder at what she had found. She could feel him there, like always, with her psychic senses. Ghosts resonated like a tickle in her brain. Kyle’s sensation was warm, a little like basking in the sunlight of a warm day. Not that she’d ever tell him that. He had a big enough ego as it was. Which, now come to think of it, was kind of weird because when he touched her the feeling was like ice on her skin. Strange. She wondered how he did that.
“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he hummed now, reading along with her. “I see. Fascinating. Interesting. Uh, Miranda? What are we looking at?”
That was her Kyle. She smiled at her friend’s way of being himself even in the most stressful times. In life, Kyle had been thin and tall and wiry, his hair a sandy shade of brown, floppy and cute, even though his beard was neatly trimmed. His ghost was the same behind the blue hazy blur that all ghosts had. He’d learned how to change his clothes to match his mood, though. Kyle was lucky in that regard. Some ghosts remained in the clothes they died in for all of eternity. Miranda had encountered ghosts who were stuck in their fuzzy pink pajamas.
Right now, as they investigated the break in at her house, Kyle had donned a long trench coat and a deerstalker cap just like the one worn by Sherlock Holmes.
He might not be able to help her clean up, but she appreciated his company while she figured this out. “This,” she said, holding a couple of the pages up, “is the police investigation report from way back when my Aunt Connie went missing. I paid for them to make photocopies back when Josh Bates first showed up, asking about her.”
Bates had been masquerading as a tour boat captain when he arrived at Ragged Rest. Right from the start, he’d begun asking about Miranda’s Aunt Connie, claiming to know her, and to know secrets about her disappearance. When his boat burned down on the open water everyone thought he might have been dead. Miranda had thought the same thing. Instead, he had only used the burning boat as a distraction to disappear.
She’d found out this weekend that Bates was a complete fake, and a despicable sort of criminal. He’d been there during the mystery at the Blue Jay Bed and Breakfast. He’d shot at Jack and would have killed him if not for Kyle’s timely intervention. Bates was not the friend he tried to make himself seem. This bad man had known her aunt, though. It made Miranda all that more curious about what had really happened to Connie.
Apparently, someone else was curious about the same thing, because…
“There’s some pages missing from this report.”
After she looked through the mess of papers and sorted out the manuscript pages from the other things, she could see it. She’d looked through the police report so many times that she knew it all by heart. That’s how she knew there were three specific pages missing.
Kyle had moved in close to look at the missing persons flyer sitting on top of one of the piles. “Wow. Your aunt was a pretty woman.”
Constance Cleary was staring back at them from the photocopy, her eyes wide with laughter and her expression happy. As always with missing persons photographs, the photograph gave the awful impression that the person had no idea what was coming. She had the same eyes that Miranda had, the same high cheekbones, the same natural beauty.
That wasn’t all they shared, either. There was more to Aunt Connie than met the eye, just like there was more to Miranda.
“So,” Kyle asked, as if reading her thoughts, “does being psychic run in the family? You and Connie, maybe all the women in your family?”
“Well, I’m not entirely sure that she was psychic, actually. I mean, nobody in my family told me she was. She disappeared when I was a teenager but I don’t even remember her mentioning it, either.” Miranda sighed. “In fact, the only person who has ever mentioned it to me was Josh Bates. How messed up is that?”
“Yes, I remember how upset you got when he said it, too.”
“Can you blame me?” Miranda asked him.
“Nope. You know, I never trusted that man.”
Miranda didn’t seem to remember Kyle putting up much of an argument to that effect at the time, but she let it go. “I know I never felt comfortable about the man. I was hoping he could shed some light on the mystery of Aunt Connie’s disappearance, I suppose, but all he’s done is made it even harder to understand.”
“Too bad Jack didn’t catch him this weekend.”
Jack Travis wasn’t just her boyfriend. He was also a detective with the Moonlight Bay PD. In fact, that was where he was now. He’d driven to the station in their rental van from the camping trip to make a report about all this. He promised to bring back more guys with him to investigate. He was good at his job, and he had quite nearly apprehended Josh Bates this past weekend. The only thing that had stopped him was that bullet that had grazed his shoulder. Bates, as it turned out, was not a nice man. Miranda had no doubt he’d been aiming for Jack’s heart.
Did that make the information he told her about Aunt Connie false? He could have been lying. Maybe Connie never had psychic abilities. Maybe he was playing some sort of con and didn’t know anything at all about Connie’s disappearance.
And then again, maybe he did.
“So, to get back to your Aunt Connie,” Kyle mused, “why did you never tell me about her before? Back when I was alive, I mean. I’d known you for ages and you never mentioned that you had an aunt who disappeared.”
“Oh, Kyle, weren’t there any parts of your life that you didn’t talk about? My aunt had been gone for quite some time before I ever met you. If I’m honest, I’d already put it behind me. I didn’t like to think about it. As far as the family knew, she just up and left us without a word. Now it might be that she’s dead, or it might be that she’s hiding somewhere, and Bates knows where that is, and I’m just all turned around about it.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, obviously meaning it. “I’m not trying to upset you.”
“I know. Just trust me, I’m not trying to cut you out. It’s just a matter of I simply don’t know the answer.”
Miranda turned her attention back to the paperwork. Things were beginning to take shape. Pieces were beginning to fit together. And yet, at the same time, she had no idea what was falling into place. Nothing made sense.
Kyle shrugged. “Well if it’s any consolation, it doesn’t look as if anything else was taken. Just those pages from your casefile. I’ve floated all through your house and nothing else is gone. As far as I can tell. I mean, I don’t have a personal inventory of your home or anything.”
“No, I agree. I can’t see anything that’s gone. Mind you, I won’t know for certain until I’ve had a chance to put everything back to rights.”
“Well, fear not, handsome Jack will be back in no time. He’ll go over this place with a fine-tooth comb and if our intruder left a hair, or a fingerprint, or a scale anywhere, Jack will make sure to find it.”
"Scale?" Miranda looked at him quizzically.
"Yes... because the guy seems fishy to me." Kyle gave her his bad joke grin.
And the bad joke was certainly deserving of it.
"That's appalling Kyle, seriously." Miranda said trying and failing to look stern but she just couldn't prevent the laugh that bubbled up from inside.
Miranda’s mood sobered once again as she looked at the clock. “Jack’s been gone for a while. He should be here soon.” She realized in that moment that she certainly would feel a lot better if he was here. “And what’s all this ‘handsome Jack’ business, hmm? I mean, I know you’ve got a man-sized crush on my man, but he’s mine, understand?”
“Oh, sure, sure. What could I do anyway, Miranda? Even if I wanted to horn in on your man, which I don’t because we’re friends and all, the most I can do is push a chair around the flo
or. I can even open a door when I’m really concentrating. As far as physical interaction with a living person, this is as close as I get.”
He put his hand on her shoulder, and she felt the cool tingling of the almost contact. It was a comforting sort of sensation, but he was right. It only happened with her, and even then, it was barely there.
“See?” he said. “It’s not like I’d be much company for a man like Jack.”
“Right,” she said with a firm nod, “and don’t you forget it.”
At that moment, the doorbell rang. They both jumped.
Miranda gave Kyle a sideways glance as she rose to her feet and hurried to the front door. “You must be the only ghost in the universe who gets spooked. Seriously.”
“Hey,” Kyle called after her. “Don’t just open the door without checking to see who it is first. You don’t know who’s behind it. It might be the burglar come back again.”
“Kyle, I’m pretty sure burglars don’t knock. If you want to be helpful, why don’t you push your head through the wall and tell me who you see out there, okay?”
“Uh, right. Spirit guide to the rescue.”
Miranda smirked at him. Ever since coming back from the next place, back to haunt her as his ghostly self, Kyle had styled himself as her personal protector. Her spirit guide. Sometimes she couldn’t live without him. Sometimes, he was about as useful as an umbrella in a hurricane.
She watched as he floated through the wall, just his head and shoulders, and a moment later pulled back in again. “It’s just a guy,” he said.
Miranda cocked an eyebrow at him as another knock came at the door. “Just a guy? Well. I’m so glad I had you look.”