A Cup of Death

by K. J. Emrick

  Janice was very still as she listened to Jack explain things one step at a time. She was watching her world fall apart around her as Jack used the pieces to build up a case for the third murder he had mentioned before. Leon Peniston was one. Josh Bates was two.

  Constance Cleary was three.

  “You got this key from Braydon Wise,” Jack accused her. “At first we thought maybe Josh Bates had given it to you but then we realized, you wouldn’t do anything at all for Bates. You hated the man enough to kill him. You haven’t said one good thing about him in all this time. No. You had to get this key from someone you trusted. Someone you respected. Someone you would do anything for, including sneaking into a stranger’s home and stealing from them. Braydon was worried about what Josh Bates had told Miranda and me. He was worried that we would find out that he killed Constance because of Bates getting a sudden bout of conscience. So he gave you this key and asked you for a favor. You jumped at the chance, of course, because you love him.”

  “You can’t prove that Braydon gave me that key. Only I know where I got it and I’m not telling you.” Janice lifted her face up to Jack in defiance.

  “Come on now, Janice. There’s no sense denying the obvious,” Jack told her. “Now, the question becomes, how did Braydon have the key? Simple. Because he had been in Ragged Rest before. He was there when he killed Constance. I believe he had help from Josh Bates, based on a photo Bates had of him and Constance together. I suspect that Braydon was the person behind the camera. I think the three of them might even have been friends back then. I know the murder had been weighing on Bates all these years. He wanted to tell Miranda about it. Maybe he would have, if he wasn’t so afraid of what Braydon Wise would do to him. Funny thing is, he should have been more afraid of you.”

  “Because it was me who killed him, you mean?” Janice said, in a voice that was perfunctory and devoid of emotion. “Fine. You still won’t ever find Constance Cleary’s body. You’ll never make any of this stick without it.”

  “Oh, I think I’ll find that body,” Jack declared. “It’s going to take me some time, sure, but I know where to look. In the water off the coast, where Josh Bates sank it. Yes. Somewhere off the coast of Moonlight Bay is the watery grave of Miranda’s aunt. I’ll keep looking until I find it. You see, Josh Bates told us he sank the body. That was something he liked to do. It was like a trademark. He would dispose of bodies for Braydon and his whole organization by dumping them in the water. I’m pretty sure that Constance was his first. It was also the only one that bothered him.”

  Bothered him enough, Miranda thought to herself, that his ghost came back just long enough to talk to Miranda and tell her what he had done.

  She sank so fast.

  “So there you have it,” Jack told Janice, standing her up and turning her around to put handcuffs on her wrists. The woman didn’t even try to resist. “Three murders. Two you committed yourself, and a third one that you made yourself an accomplice to. If you’re lucky, you’ll get out of prison before you die. If you’re really, really lucky.”

  Janice stuttered a half-hearted denial as her hands started to tremble. This time when Janice Peniston began to cry, there was no holding the tears back. The tears were real this time, but she wasn’t crying for the people she had killed. Her tears were only for herself.

  Chapter 16

  Kyle was in rare form when they got back to Ragged Rest, telling Miranda the whole story from his perspective, even though she had been right there with him the whole time. “Of course,” he said in conclusion, “Jack was good, as always, but let’s be honest. None of it would have been possible without your brave, loyal ghost friend being there to help.”

  She was just too tired to argue with him. Besides, he wasn’t completely wrong. Kyle deserved a lot of credit for the way this one had turned out. He really was starting to fit into his role as spirit guide very nicely.

  By the time Miranda reached her home again, she was thoroughly exhausted. She was still driving the rental van, and she would have to deal with returning it sooner rather than later, because they were already past the four days they had signed it out for. She had no idea what the overcharge was for keeping a rental van past the day you agreed to return it, but she had to imagine it wasn’t cheap. Even bestselling authors had to watch their budget.

  There was nothing for it, however. Jack was still at the station doing mountains of paperwork to process the arrests of Hannah Smith, Janice Peniston, and Braydon Wise. A separate, smaller stack had landed on his desk just before she had said goodbye. That one was for the messy issue of Josh Bates dying while in their custody. Thankfully, the coroner had already phoned to say the cause of death was poison that had been administered twelve to fifteen hours previously. That would eliminate any liability on the part of the police department.

  Jack had sighed with relief when he heard that, and kissed Miranda full on the lips. “Maybe I’m cut out to be Senior Sergeant one day,” he said, “but I’ll be glad when this headache is over. All I know for sure, is that I love you.”

  She had no idea how those two things connected, but she wasn’t going to turn down the compliment. Jack was the best thing in her life. She hated coming home alone, to this big house that served to remind her that her Aunt Connie’s disappearance was now officially a murder. She wanted Jack to hold her and kiss her and tell her it would be all right, and then take up the rest of her night with private moments together between the sheets of her bed.

  Thinking of her bed, of course, reminded her how Janice Peniston and her husband Leon had been in this house sneaking about, and how Janice had described her bed sheets to her at the diner. She would never sleep in that bed again until she had removed every scrap of cloth from it and laundered them thoroughly. Or burned them, perhaps. Yes. Burning them felt right.

  She yawned behind her hand. When the relief that everything was finally over had really hit her, it was as if every ounce of motivation was drained away and all she wanted to do was sleep. The last parts of the criminal organization they had stumbled into at the Blue Jay Bed and Breakfast were under lock and key and soon to be heading to jail. They had uncovered a decades old mystery buried in her family’s past. Kyle had found a cool new ghost trick.

  All in all, she’d had worse weeks than this. Not many, but a few.

  Sleep was what she really needed. Hours and hours of glorious sleep. There was just so much yet to do. The van, her sheets, the locks on all the doors needed to be changed too because even if Braydon Wise had been the only person out there with a spare key to her doors, she didn’t feel safe behind these walls anymore. The locksets hadn’t been changed in God alone knew how long, and now Miranda could see the problem that created. Jack had agreed with her and promised to go shopping with her tomorrow for new sets.

  Another yawn stopped her in her tracks as her mind continued to race. For a long while now there had been all these niggling doubts in the back of her mind surrounding her aunt’s disappearance and, even though she did not have a body to bury, at least she knew who had killed Connie, and why. It was better than not knowing anything at all.

  She was a psychic, and sensitive to the other side, but she would probably never see Connie’s ghost. Too much time had gone by. Whatever path her aunt’s spirit had taken, it had gone there years and years ago. It brought on a whole new kind of sadness to think about it. Not only had her aunt been murdered, but Miranda was too late to do anything about it.

  Well, that wasn’t exactly true. She had helped put the people responsible behind bars. Somewhere, somehow, she was certain that Aunt Connie was smiling down on her.

  So, as much as she wanted to drop right where she was and sleep for the next week or so, she simply couldn’t let herself do it. Life was funny that way. When it was the fullest, you were too busy to appreciate it. When it was empty, you could find yourself bored stiff.

  Too bad there couldn’t always be a happy medium.

  Heh. ‘Happy medium.’ Psychic hu
mor.

  Dear Lord in Heaven, she was tired.

  She stripped the sheets from the bed but was just too tired right now to remake it with clean sheets. That could wait until a bit later. She yawned again.

  “I sure could do with a cup of coffee right about now,” she said out loud, rubbing at her temple where a headache was threatening to start.

  “Yeah, me too,” Kyle said with gusto, rubbing his hands together. “Maybe a nice French Roast with a dash of cinnamon. Ooh, or a Belgian blend with vanilla creamer.”

  “Kyle, you can’t drink coffee,” Miranda reminded him with yet another yawn. “You’re a ghost.”

  “Ah, but I can smell it. That’s one of the few pleasures I have left to me, you know.”

  Miranda blinked at him, not sure that she’d heard him right. “You can smell coffee? Like, actually smell coffee? What else can you smell?”

  “Why, are you worried that you stink? You don’t, by the way. Usually you smell wonderful.”

  “Usually?” she demanded, staring him down. “Actually, never mind. How is it that you can smell coffee?”

  “It’s a ghost thing,” he said cryptically. “I admit, it’s kind of strange, but as a ghost you learn to take whatever little pleasures you have left to you.”

  “Well, now that I know about your secret power, I’ll be sure to brew coffee more often.”

  The look on his face, when he heard that promise, was so very cute. “Thank you, Miranda. You’ve always been my best friend. Sometimes I wonder what I would ever do without you.”

  “Well, for one thing, you’d be in Heaven,” she pointed out. “Or was it Hell? What was that whole thing you said about meeting the Devil himself?”

  “I’d rather not talk about that,” he said adamantly. “Some things I remember from the other side. Some things I’ve forgotten, obviously. Some things… I’d like to forget.”

  “I understand, Kyle. I think.”

  Actually, Miranda didn’t understand. She had no way of knowing what Kyle had gone through after he died and moved on. It was something she was content to find out about, in time, for herself. Many, many years from now, she hoped.

  Going to the kitchen she set up the coffee maker, setting it to a slow brew. It would take a little longer to get her coffee this way, but she was doing it for Kyle. After everything that he’d done for her in his afterlife, letting him take the time to smell the coffee was the least she could do.

  While she waited she decided to sit down at the kitchen table and rest her head in her arms. It would only be for a few minutes. Just until the coffee was done. Just a little bit.

  A hand on her shoulder gently woke her. She didn’t even remember closing her eyes but now she blearily opened them to find Jack standing over her with a smile, and a steaming cup of coffee.

  “What…?” she asked groggily. “When did you get here?”

  “An hour ago.” He put the cup down on the table in front of her. “The coffee was ready when I got here. This is the second pot, actually. It’s nearly midnight, Miranda, but I decided to let you sleep. You need it.”

  She reached out to take his hand and held it against her cheek. “Thank you, Jack. For everything.”

  “We did it together. You and me, and Kyle too. Is he here, by the way?”

  Miranda looked all around but there was no sign of her spirit guide. “No, he’s not. Maybe he decided to give us some alone time?”

  “Maybe. He might be in the living room with Butter, too. I stopped by and picked our lovable mutt up from Jean-Paul and Sapphire. I figured they’d done us enough of a favor by watching him since we got back from our little camping trip.”

  “Butter’s here?” she said, coming more awake. She missed her dog. He’d become as much a part of her life as either Jack or Kyle.

  “We make kind of a funny bunch, don’t we?” Jack asked, as if he was reading her thoughts.

  “Do we?” she said quizzically. “I know I’m really sleepy, but I thought we were kind of a nice little group. Eclectic, even.”

  “You could say that,” he laughed. “You, the psychic-detective-author. Me, Moonlight Bay’s finest. Kyle, the ghostly sidekick. And then there’s Butter, the lovable four-footed defender of my girlfriend. It’s like Scooby Doo for adults.”

  “Hmm. Yeah, I guess so.” She couldn’t help but laugh with him. “Do you mind very much?”

  “Mind?” Jack said and leaned in, putting a hand against her cheek. “Are you kidding? I wouldn’t have it any other way. I wouldn’t change a thing. Honestly, I’d never go back to the way things were before you came to Moonlight Bay. I can’t imagine the place without you.”

  “Even though I make your life impossible?”

  “You don’t make my life impossible,” he promised her. “You give my life meaning. You make everything better, with the way you care about people. The living, I mean, but ghosts too.”

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m doing too much,” she admitted. “Like I’m way out of my league. I’m a novelist for crying out loud.”

  “And a fine novelist at that. Maybe that’s your job, honey, but you’re more than that. You are this amazing, bright light who has come through so much. These last few months have been insane. Hectic doesn’t cover it. There’s been danger, and mystery, and all these crazy things that have led us right here, to this point in time. I couldn’t have possibly done this without you. There is no way that these mysteries would have all been solved if it was just me.”

  Her heart filled with a deep sense of love and belonging. She thought maybe he was overstating the issue just a bit. Jack was a great police officer. He was dedicated and he was driven. The same qualities that made him so good at his job also made him the man that she had fallen in love with.

  Moonlight Bay had been good for her. She couldn’t imagine life without this place, or without this man standing right here with her.

  “I love you, Jack Travis.”

  He leaned in even closer, down on his knees beside her chair, and this time he took her face in both hands as he kissed her deeply. The world moved around them. Miranda gave herself over to this moment, realizing that no matter what bad things might be around them, Jack would always be there to make her feel better.

  When an eternity had passed them by, Jack’s lips parted sweetly from hers. “I love you, too,” he told her. “I always will.”

  They were moving in for another kiss when the noise rose from somewhere deeper in the house. It was a ghostly howling that set Miranda’s teeth on edge. Jack cringed as well, putting the palms of his hands over his ears. As the sound rose and rose and rose in pitch there was a loud crash, like something very fragile falling to the floor and shattering.

  Then everything stopped.

  “What in God’s name!” Jack shouted. If he had the same ringing in his ears that Miranda had in hers, she didn’t blame him for raising his voice so he could hear himself. “What was that!”

  “Sorry,” Miranda heard Kyle calling out. “Um. Sorry. That was me. Don’t worry I can fix it… you have glue, right?”

  Miranda couldn’t help but laugh. “It’s Kyle,” she told Jack. “He’s practicing his new powerful ghost voice thing. He just wants to be prepared if he ever needs to protect me again.”

  Another crash followed the first one.

  “That wasn’t me!” Kyle promised, followed quickly by, “Well, it was sort of me. I’ll get the dustpan. It’s just… it’s going to take me a while.”

  Jack sighed as he stared into Miranda’s eyes. “Maybe we need protection from Kyle.”

  “Shh. He’s doing his best. Plus, he just said he’s going to be busy for a while cleaning up.” Her smile turned wicked, and she liked the way it felt. “Maybe you could put me to bed while we wait?”

  “Now that,” he told her, “is the best idea I’ve heard in days.”

  Miranda was woken from a deep sleep the next morning to find Butter whining and nudging her hand.

  “What’s the matte
r boy? You want to go out?” she said, her voice thick with sleep.

  He whined again more urgently, and Miranda rubbed her eyes trying to wake herself up. She sat up and yawned, not wanting to get up yet, but the dog was being quite insistent. She looked at the clock. Goodness, 6AM. Butter was early this morning.

  Jack mumbled something in his sleep and rolled over onto his other side. Miranda smiled. He was so tired last night she wouldn’t be surprised if he slept for a week. Miranda certainly felt like she could.

  Butter whined again, and she turned to smile at him. “Okay, okay. I get the message. I’m getting up.”

  She slid out of bed and quickly pulled on some clothes. A loud banging noise coming from the front of the house had her pausing with her hand on the bedroom door handle. Before she could decide what it was the noise reverberated through the house once again.

  “What was that?” She stood still, listening.

  Butter whined again. The noise sounded a third time and Miranda realized that it sounded like someone pounding on the front door. Who on earth would be calling at such an early hour.

  She looked over at Jack debating whether to wake him or not. He looked so peaceful. She could handle this.

  She hoped.

  After the last couple of days, she hoped it wasn’t more bad news. With Butter at her heels she ran downstairs to the front door. Peering through the peep hole she was surprised to see who was on the other side. She quickly pulled the door open as the other person knocked once again, causing her to step back in surprise.

  “Ginger! What are you doing here?”

  Miranda had met Ginger Peck a few days ago when she, Jack, Jean-Paul and Sapphire had found a dead man in a dry lakebed in the middle of nowhere. They’d ended up at the Blue Jay Bed and Breakfast and found themselves right in the center of another murder mystery.