A Wonder Springs Cozy Mystery Omnibus: Books 1, 2 & 3

by B. T. Alive

  The closer he got to this woman, the deeper she scowled. By the time he reached her table, I thought her face might implode.

  “What can I get you?” he bleated, with a solicitous droop.

  “The chef,” she bellowed, in a piercing bray that filled the crowded room.

  “To eat?” he blurted.

  “I wish to speak directly to the chef,” she announced. “I will not entrust my digestion to the mental capacity of anyone working for half the minimum wage.”

  He gaped.

  “Now!” she barked.

  Hamish the waiter skittered away. I couldn’t see where he went, but the next thing I knew, the massive chef exploded from the kitchen door and barreled right toward me.

  “This is joke!” he growled, as I leapt sideways to dodge the man. He covered his face in thick fingers, growling further expostulations that I was probably glad were in Russian. But he dropped his hands as he lurched through the archway into the light, unleashing a forced, beefy smile that was fairly ghastly.

  As the ancient Pritchett berated the chef with her order in endless, exquisite detail, I watched in utter fascination.

  The woman could easily be in her eighties or nineties, which meant she was probably Nyle’s aunt, maybe even his grandmother. The German word schadenfreude bubbled up from some long-ago course I’d taken in college: the pleasure of savoring another person’s pain. I had to admit that I was enjoying this. For all his lucky breaks, Nyle seemed to have inherited one truly horrific grandmother.

  As she droned on, something unsettling happened.

  A faint tingle prickled along the hairs of my arm. I startled, assuming someone had touched me.

  “Hello?” I blurted.

  But I stood alone in the empty hallway.

  The sheriff still hadn’t emerged from the bathroom. At the other end, the kitchen sounded silent; without the chef clattering around in there, the emanating quiet was bizarrely unnerving.

  No one could have touched me.

  Whatever, I must have imagined it. I needed to get out of here.

  Besides, I could see that Nyle was just as engrossed in the chef drama as I had been. It was the perfect time to sneak out and make my escape from this dining room before he saw me.

  I edged out, working my way around the back of the room toward the entrance. I almost made it, too.

  But I got snagged by Grandma.

  “Summer!” she said, dashing in between me and the door with full plates balanced literally up to her shoulder. “I am so sorry to ask you this, but it’s a madhouse this morning. I need another pair of hands. Would you go see Vladik and take those last plates?”

  “Vladik?” I said, bewildered.

  “The chef!” She nodded back across the room, to a wide, low window in the back wall that opened into the chaos of the kitchen. A jutting metal counter held several full plates.

  “Oh,” I said. “Um…”

  Grandma squinted. “Is that a problem?”

  “No! Totally fine,” I said. “Glad to help.”

  “Excellent,” she said. “You’re a peach.” And she shimmered away.

  I fast-walked back to the metal counter, basically staring at the wall to hide my face. As I approached, I could see (and hear) that Vladik the chef had been released and was back thrashing around his kitchen. I tentatively reached for the nearest plate.

  “No touch!” he roared. “Is not for you!”

  “I’m not trying to eat it,” I snapped, although despite the man’s rudeness, the scent of his handiwork was certainly torturing my empty stomach. “Grandma told me to take these out.”

  “Is true?” he said, and he raked a skeptical glance down my wrinkled dress suit. Then he jabbed a thick finger at the two rightmost plates. “Those two. Getting cold. Table ten.”

  “Um,” I said, looking around the room. “I don’t see any numbers—”

  Vladik burst out in a torrent of Russian, eyes raised to heaven, like Tevye imploring what he’d done to deserve such torment. At last he pointed out to the diners. “Right there,” he growled. “Man with beard.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh. You know, I think Tina wanted to do this one—”

  “Pink hair lady,” he snapped. “Go!”

  A few tables away, I caught Grandma watching us as she lowered plates. Her face was a mask, utterly without expression.

  Was this some kind of test? What was up with this woman?

  “Unbelievable,” I muttered. But I grabbed the two plates and marched right to Nyle’s table.

  I told myself to relax. I’d eaten out with Nyle. The guy hardly looked at the wait staff. This would be over in ten seconds.

  I clanked down the plates. “Enjoy your meal!” I gasped, at double speed—I’d considered disguising my voice, but it wound up happening anyway—and I turned to sprint away. See? Done. I had totally nailed it—

  Except, I tripped.

  Yes. For real. The freaking shoelaces had come undone.

  I hate sneakers.

  I tried to scramble up, but Nyle’s bony hand had already closed around my sleeve. As he half-yanked me to my feet, asking if I was all right, a strange minor jolt rippled through my sleeve, like I’d felt with his cousin Bryce. But given that his huge eyes were bulging at me like ping pong balls, another weird jolt was the least of my concerns.

  “Summer?” Nyle shrieked, and all the surrounding diners startled and stared. “What are you doing here?”

  Not far behind him, Grandma gasped in surprise.

  Chapter 8

  There were several ways I could have played this.

  Here’s what I went with.

  “Summer?” I said, sounding confused. “Oh! You must mean my twin! Ha!”

  I’m not going to say I’m proud of it.

  “Twin?” Nyle said, baffled.

  “No worries,” I said. “Happens all the time. It’s fine, I’m flattered. She’s the hot one, really—”

  “Summer, you don’t have a twin,” he said. “You gripe about being an only child at least once a week.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Wait, did she say that? The nerve—”

  “Do you know this woman?” said a deep, throaty voice. It was the woman sitting at his table; I’d been so laser-focused on Nyle that I’d barely noticed her.

  Now I almost blasted out laughing, because she was such an absurd mismatch.

  Not only was she lean, and attractive, and no older than her early thirties (so, at least ten years younger than he was), she was also wild. From the front, that combo of dark long hair and pink short sides looked even more rocking, and her makeup was dark and defiant. She wasn’t exactly a Goth, but she could easily be a punk rocker, just starting to age out but still looking good.

  I checked for a ring. What? She had a rock the size of the Epcot Center. Nyle had a fiancee who looked like this? Come on.

  Maybe he’d sold his soul to the devil. No… by now, the devil would have wanted a refund.

  “Of course I know this woman! We work together,” Nyle told her. “I mean, we did. Yesterday, she quit.”

  Grandma frowned, with deep displeasure.

  I knew it.

  “How do you already have a new job?” Nyle asked me. He stepped away from me and back toward his seat, looking me up and down with growing distaste. “You didn’t even change.”

  “Okay, look,” I snapped. “I have had a very long twenty-four hours.”

  “Clearly,” he said. “Did you… did you follow me? I didn’t even tell anyone at the office I was coming here.”

  “Follow you?” I cried. “Oh my gosh, really? You think I would lose a promotion we both know should have been mine and then I’d follow you down to Virginia so I could, what, beg you to gloat?”

  “So this is actually your next career move?” he said. “A waitress? In… rural Virginia? Huh.” He shrugged his scarecrow shoulders, and he sat down to his plate. “I can see it,” he said, with a sneer.

  That’s really what did it.
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br />   Very few people can pull off a legit, blood-boiling sneer of utter contempt. The kind of look that makes you feel like they’re watching you clean out their toilet with your own toothbrush, and they’re looking forward to seeing you brush your teeth after. It’s a rare talent. Nyle was a master.

  But it also didn’t help that his gorgeous fiancee looked up from her phone and said, “Oh wait, it’s the promotion girl? The one who was cheating the clients with dementia?”

  Behind her, Grandma’s eyes went wide.

  “I did not cheat anyone!” I said.

  “No, it was just coincidence,” Nyle said smoothly, as he picked up his fork and started to dig in to some unholy custom special order of eggs and bacon and white sauce. “We just happened to have to cancel half your contracts in the last six months, because clients kept calling and saying they didn’t fully remember reading what they’d signed.”

  “It’s not my fault they had a few senior moments,” I snapped. “That’s not dementia.”

  Of course, they hadn’t really been “senior moments” either.

  That’s the problem with the Touch. You get two or three hours into one of these epic sales meetings with a risk-averse bureaucrat, and it’s like, we both know you’re planning to sign this. Can we just pretend we already did the extra five hours of “due diligence” to cover your butt?

  Maybe I’m being too vague here. To be one hundred percent clear: yes, I’d started wiping people’s short-term memories to close deals. (Also lying. Slightly.)

  Especially in the last few months, when I’d finally started to close in on this tool’s numbers. After years of watching him win.

  Am I proud to admit this? Not at all.

  But in my defense…

  … um…

  Hmm. I used to have something. It’ll come to me.

  “You can call them ‘senior moments’ if you want,” Nyle said, talking through a mouthful and chewing with gusto. “Point is, the rest of us seem to hit our targets without taking advantage of mental lapses.”

  “You trained me to take every advantage I could!” I snapped. “You had me read The Art of War!” Which was true.

  Nyle’s eyes flicked toward his fiancee, but he didn’t look at me, just shoveled another bite and shrugged. “I don’t remember saying that.”

  At the next table, Nyle’s heavier alter ego and his wife/boss were openly staring at me, and I could feel the glares of others around the room. I probably only had seconds before Grandma or even Sheriff Jake escorted me out the door, but I didn’t care. This guy was going to walk away with my career; the least I could do was wreck his precious breakfast.

  “I was finally going to kick your skinny butt,” I said. “And you knew it.”

  “Maybe,” said Nyle. He met my eye and cracked another sneer, this time with bacon bits stuck between his teeth. “But you quit. So now we’ll never know. And I’d like to finish my breakfast in peace.”

  “I hope you choke on it!” I spluttered.

  He grinned, swallowed, and forked a giant mouthful.

  Then he frowned. His face creased with a spasm of pain, like he’d suffered a sudden cramp and expected imminent intestinal difficulties.

  “Nyle?” said his fiancee, sharp and frightened. “Nyle, what’s wrong?”

  But Nyle writhed, sucked one harsh gasp, and then pitched forward onto his plate. The dish clattered, and then was still.

  At the sound of the crash, everyone in the dining room went silent and stared. Slowly, his gray beard began to sop up the wet remains of eggs and sauce.

  Then everyone went nuts.

  People were yelling, screaming, crashing out of their chairs to get close or get away. A ring of stricken Nyle clones surrounded me, hemmed me in, everyone talking at once.

  “Did he choke? Is he choking?” bawled the wife/boss. Her beady eyes were raking across my face, and her breath was onion sour. “I heard you tell him to choke!”

  “I didn’t… he’s not…” I stammered. Shock made me stupid; I was still staring at the back of Nyle’s head, willing him to sit the hell up and quit freaking us out.

  “He didn’t choke,” growled Sheriff Jake, as he shouldered his way in through the ring.

  The family went quiet as he bent over Nyle, nostrils flaring, and sniffed hard with that huge nose. He sniffed around his head, then bent further and got several deep whiffs of the demolished breakfast.

  “Should I take that… plate?” I said, on some obscure idiotic impulse, the Worst Substitute Waitress to the last.

  “Don’t touch anything,” he barked. “This is a crime scene.”

  “Crime? I don’t understand—”

  “This man is dead,” said Sheriff Jake. “And my best guess is poison.”

  Nyle’s family murmured in surprise and shock. Poison? Nyle? How can he tell it’s POISON?

  “We’ll need tests to confirm, of course,” the sheriff announced. “But if he was poisoned…” The sheriff fixed me with a piercing glare. Softly, he said, “Now I wonder who could have done that.”

  I froze. “You don’t… you can’t actually think that I would…”

  He did.

  Part II

  Chapter 9

  Sheriff Jake scowled hard over that massive mustache. He looked ready to arrest me right there in the dining room, surrounded by the stares of irate relatives and Nyle’s marinating corpse.

  Panic tightened in my chest. The creep who’d grabbed Charm and tried to give me skin cancer had been bad enough, but this was The Law, a whole new level of threat. I couldn’t just slug a sheriff and run.

  So much for being safe in Wonder Springs.

  “Sir, I assure you,” I said, and my voice sounded calm, almost mechanical, “I don’t even work here. I was asked to bring out this man’s plate. I’m not aware that he had any health issues, but—”

  “Why would you know anything about his health?” said the sheriff, arching his wild eyebrows. “Unless you did, in fact, already know ‘this man’?”

  “She worked with him,” said his fiancee (ex-fiancee? was Nyle actually dead?) in a dull monotone. The black-and-pink-haired woman was rooted in her chair as if frozen, a few feet from Nyle’s side. She was staring at her fingers, shredding a straw wrapper into bits. Her bleak face looked ten years older. “And she just quit yesterday because he got her promotion.”

  “Did she?” said the sheriff, with elaborate curiosity, as if he and the whole room hadn’t heard the whole fight. “And now here you are, with exclusive access to the man’s breakfast. Isn’t that… convenient.”

  “It’s not like that!” I sputtered, as the ring of hostile gazes prickled deeper into my skin. “I had no idea he’d be here! I only came to this stupid town in the first place because of Grandma!”

  At the mention of Grandma, his eyes flickered, but he cocked his head with a scoff. “Is that so?” he said. “I hope you’ll pardon my skepticism, young lady. I may need to take steps to make sure you stay in our stupid little town for the duration of the investigation.”

  He stepped toward me, hand outstretched and reaching for my arm.

  I backed up, but the ring of relatives closed behind me. My pulse was spiking, throbbing through my neck. Any second, one of these idiots was going to grab my bare arm, and then I’d really have some explaining to do. Like the whole “revenge murder” thing wasn’t already plenty.

  “You mean jail?” I chirped. I hate when I chirp. I tried to bring my voice back down to normal. “Aren’t we jumping the gun a bit here? Don’t you need a warrant? A trial? All that good stuff?”

  “You’re an out-of-town stranger and a clear flight risk,” he said, still advancing with slow caution, like I was the wild dog. “I’m sure the judge will agree that you require supervision.”

  Five more feet, and I was going to downgrade from “complimentary lunch guest” to “murder suspect being held for interrogation.” Possibly even “future government experiment”, depending on who would find out if I unwillin
gly wiped the memory of a small-town sheriff in public. I had no idea how the chain of command worked in law enforcement. For all I knew, this guy had a panic button to the FBI. What was I supposed to do?

  No idea. My mind went blank.

  Thanks, mind.

  But behind me, Grandma Meredith spoke.

  “That won’t be necessary, Jake,” she said, in her crisp Southern lilt. “I’ll vouch for this woman. She’s not going anywhere.”

  The sheriff stopped short and glared over my shoulder.

  The ring of relatives had parted for Grandma, and she stood beside me, arms crossed, glaring right back up at the big burly man.

  The two faced each other in bristling silence, unsaid words sparking across the space. Ancient feuds and secrets roiled between them, and for a second even the murder faded away, upstaged by the mystery of long lives entwined.

  Then the sheriff snorted. In a low voice, he said, “No offense, but you don’t have the best track record in this department, Christina.”

  Grandma’s eyes flared, with an anger so sudden that it made me flinch. Whatever he was referencing, the sheriff had struck a nerve.

  Or maybe Grandma just resented mere mortals hearing that she had a first name.

  She spoke with icy calm. “This is not the proper venue to exhibit our respective histories,” she said. “Unless you’ve developed a taste for excruciating shame.” The sheriff jolted, but she smiled with lethal sweetness. “No offense.”

  The sheriff scowled. He drew closer to Grandma, though he also seemed to hold back, like they were two magnets flipped wrong and repelling. In an even lower voice, he growled, “I don’t care why you brought her here. No promises.”

  “Of course,” she said, with sharp annoyance. “If you get actual evidence, do what you will. I wouldn’t harbor a murderer.”

  Ouch, I thought. Thanks for the vote of confidence.

  The sheriff nodded, then turned to the ring of relatives. As he belatedly went into Officer Mode, offering his stiff condolences and formally requesting them to retire to their rooms and await questioning, Grandma finally turned toward me.