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

by B. T. Alive

  That said, if they were going to stand there making out all day…

  “Okay, okay,” Tina said, with a grin. She raised her head, but still tucked Mr. Charm close against her chest. “We don’t want Mommy to get grumpy, right, Charmsy?”

  “I’m not his mom,” I said.

  “Don’t say that!” Tina said. She covered his ears. Mr. Charm’s eyelids popped open, flashing his gaze of brilliant blue, but he settled back into stasis.

  “Tina, seriously, if you’re just going to play with the cat—”

  “Okay!” she said. “Got it. Time for the plan. Who do you want to ask for the wedding list?”

  I drew back, surprised and deflated. My back hit a counter and nearly toppled a cream carafe, which didn’t exactly boost my self-confidence.

  “Sorry! I didn’t realize it was a surprise,” Tina said, darting out a hand and saving the carafe. “All his guests were exes, right? Makes sense to work through the list.”

  “How did you know that?” I said. “Do you know all the guests?”

  A shadow flitted across her face, but she almost masked it with a thoughtful frown. “I don’t know who all was on the list,” she said. “But we could talk to Glynis. She was planning everything.”

  “She also saw your little outburst,” I said, noting how she’d avoided my question. She might be cradling a cozy feline shield, but she still wasn’t quite back to her open, carefree self yet. “I’m not sure Glynis will talk to us.”

  “But who else would have the list?” Tina said. “You don’t want to talk to Lee? She must be… devastated.” Tina shuddered.

  “Ah, no. She’s the option of last resort,” I said, opting not to add that, after my own encounter with the woman, she wouldn’t want to talk to us either. “I’m thinking Natisha.”

  “Natisha?”

  “When we talked to… him…” I hesitated, seeing Tina tense. “… he mentioned that the wedding had been planned to include a tea ceremony. There’s only one tea place in town, and he would have wanted catering from the very best.”

  Tina nodded, her face grim. “Only the best, for sure.”

  We approached the main counter, and the owner, Natisha Reed. Natisha—entrepreneur, tea aficionado, and yoga instructor—was a smiling, athletic black woman in her mid-forties. At least, I thought she was that age… somehow she looked younger this morning, or at least, more fit than usual. Or was she wearing extra makeup? Something. As we approached, she gave us both a nod and a grin, but she also glanced over our shoulders, as if checking the front door with anticipation.

  We opened with small talk about the wedding and Dante’s “disappearance”—it was still too early for us all to come out and say he was dead—and I remembered what made talking with Natisha so tricky.

  Officially, Natisha wasn’t In The Know about the existence of psychic powers. As far as we Merediths knew, the only Wonder Springs residents who knew were ourselves and Cade and his dad, the sheriff… oh, and also Fiona, apparently. Ugh. Anyhow, despite this supposed ignorance, Natisha always had this air of knowing far more about the Merediths than she let on… a well of secrets.

  Still, I managed to maneuver her into a conversational position where I could say, as an offhand remark, “Actually, I thought I heard that you might be catering. Some kind of tea ceremony?”

  “Me?” Natisha said. Her smile contracted, and her eyes narrowed.

  Maybe she wasn’t a well of secrets. Maybe she was just cagey.

  But before I could press the point, she lit up with a smile that was nearly incandescent. Leaning around me, she flagged a huge wave and called across her crowded tea shop. “Hey! Zack!”

  I turned. At the front entrance stood a tall, thin, black dude (who was definitely in his mid-forties), with short, graying hair but dark-rimmed glasses that were still fairly hip. In one large hand, he carried a massive backpack by the top handle, and with the other, he lifted his long arm in an enthusiastic greeting.

  He looked like an overgrown computer geek with a surprisingly nice smile. And you didn’t have to be an empath to feel the strong undertow of mutual attraction.

  Zack, huh? I thought. Good for you, Natisha.

  Just then… four little adorable black kids rushed in behind him, chattering and tugging at his arms.

  Oh.

  I turned back to Natisha. “Do you want to introduce us to your… friend… with all the kids?”

  “He’s their uncle,” she snapped.

  Oh.

  Zack crossed toward us quickly, loping along on long legs. As he drew near, trailing his swarm of kids, he gave Tina a formal nod, lingering perhaps a few gratuitous milliseconds before turning to me with the same courtesy. But then he returned to Natisha, and cranked up his full smile. Well. Good for him.

  “Four smoothies?” Natisha asked, with a sultry raised eyebrow that made the question seem vaguely indecent.

  “Please,” Zack said. His voice was sonorous and loud, like a man used to talking over a din. He nodded at a small niece, who was climbing his leg like a tree. “And make it fast.”

  “Oh, I’m fast,” she said, her voice dropping another register.

  Zack’s eyes twinkled. Then he glanced at Tina and me, and he frowned, confused. He looked back at Natisha, but a second later, he did a double-take back at us, looking even more uncertain.

  What the…? I glanced at Tina, and rolled my eyes. She was clutching the cat and mooning up at Zack like some junior high girl at a dance, trying to arch her eyebrow like Natisha.

  I rolled my eyes. So much for Mr. Charm blocking all kinds of waves. Apparently his protection didn’t block empathic crushes. That was all we needed, Tina obliviously turning the head of Natisha’s beau. One Wonder Springs murder at a time, please.

  I dug my elbow into Tina’s ribs. “What cute kids,” I gushed. “Tina, I bet they’d love to meet Mr. Charm.”

  “What?” she said, dazed. “Oh, sure.” She flourished the cat at the nearest niece, and the girl shrieked with delight. At this, Tina grinned, flashing Zack a look of such happy, transcendent longing that, if the dude had happened to see it, he would probably still be writing her some epic poem.

  “Tina,” I snapped. “Over there.” I waved at a distant corner. “Far away.”

  Tina frowned, irritated, but trying to concentrate. Then she realized what was happening, flushed, and nodded hard. With the natural charisma of a born kindergarten teacher, she ushered four kids who were complete strangers happily off to a table in the far corner.

  I exhaled, relieved, and turned back to Natisha and Zack.

  Both were staring at me, nonplussed.

  Chapter 16

  “She loves kids,” I said, talking too fast. “They’re right over there, they’re safe, it’s been at least an hour since she raged out.”

  Zack’s eyebrows shot up.

  “No, no! It’s fine,” I said. “Really, she’ll be fine, as long as she has the cat.”

  “The… cat?” Zack said. He glanced at Natisha.

  “Tina’s a sweetie,” Natisha said, emphatically, and Zack visibly relaxed.

  Then Natisha nodded at me. “This girl, on the other hand…”

  “Hey!” I said, trying to tilt this discussion toward friendly banter. “I thought we were pals.”

  “Sure,” Natisha said, lining up a row of pink smoothies. “But you do ask a lot of questions.”

  “Hmm,” Zack said, and he gave me an appraising look that I couldn’t quite read. “I’ve got a friend like that. Two, actually.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told Natisha. “I only came in here to drink some tea, shoot the breeze, and see if you happened to have the guest list for the wedding.”

  “What?” Natisha snapped, fumbling the last smoothie and slopping a pink plop onto the wooden counter. “The guest list? What on earth?”

  “Whoa, no stress,” I said, flicking this Zack guy a nervous glance. Why was Natisha freaking out?

  “You w
ant to make trouble, I’m going to get stressed,” Natisha grumbled, wiping up the spill. In a lower voice, she muttered, “We’ve had enough trouble in this town without you making some accident a murder.”

  “Murder?” Zack said, perking up.

  “Don’t you start,” Natisha snapped at him. “This is Wonder Springs, not Back Mosby.”

  I frowned. “Is that some Virginia joke? Or is it an actual place I should know?” The name did sound vaguely familiar.

  “Oh, it’s real,” Zack said. “All too real. I run a game store there, on those benighted streets.” He shrugged. “We’re basically the small-town murder capital of the Shenandoah Valley.”

  “Enough!” Natisha said, giving his arm a light slap that was both flirtatious but also for real.

  “I’m serious!” he said. “If you crunch the statistical odds, for a town with our population… you’d be safer in Miami. Downtown.”

  Natisha eyed me. “See what you started?”

  “Totally,” I said. “So how about that list?”

  “I am not going to encourage this,” Natisha said, starting to look really angry. “You want that information, you can go talk to Lee or Glynis. Or don’t.”

  “But you’re so much more… discreet,” I said. Which was true. “You don’t really want me to go hassle Lee, do you? Today?”

  Natisha hesitated. She held my gaze for a long moment, and then sighed.

  “I don’t have it,” she said.

  “What?” I said, crestfallen.

  “They did order tea, but they didn’t give me names or anything,” Natisha said. “Now would you please just let this go? Can we just have an accident in this town that’s actually an accident?”

  “Those vines weren’t an accident,” I said.

  Natisha huffed, but she said nothing.

  “I heard about that,” Zack said. He turned toward me, his intelligent face aglow with excitement. “What is it you’re looking for? The wedding guest list?”

  “Um, yes,” I said.

  “Here we go,” Natisha said, with a theatrical sigh that was not entirely displeased. “Mr. Supergeek.”

  “Give me five minutes. Tops,” said Zack. And he reached into his backpack and slid out the hugest laptop I’d ever seen.

  “Whoa,” I said. “What do you do with that thing? Run Tribesy?”

  “This?” he said, as he fired up the screen, which was so large that the entire tea shop could probably have watched a movie on it. “This is just my travel machine.”

  “That man loves his computers,” Natisha said, with somewhat-playful envy. “He’s all into that one program… what’s it called, like the girl from Secret Garden? Lennox?”

  “Linux,” Zack corrected, but he was already entranced in his columns of data. He seemed to be using some search engine I didn’t recognize, but I was afraid to get closer than five feet or so. If I accidentally zapped this deluxe gargantuan laptop, I’d be paying it off until his nieces were having their weddings.

  For a few long minutes, he typed, scanning the screen with eager, hyper glances. But before long, his initial enthusiasm began to sour.

  “Those are the names, right? Dante Radcliff? Lee Lannon?” He nodded me to check the screen.

  I leaned as close as I dared, then nodded.

  “You’re sure? Neither of them would have used some other name?”

  “Not that I heard,” I said. “You can’t find anything?”

  “I can’t understand it.” He typed another round, in a furious staccato, then eyed the screen and grimaced. “I’ve checked every major registry.”

  “Could they have turned on some privacy settings?” I asked.

  Zack shrugged, with a little half-smile.

  “Oh,” I said. I tried to catch Natisha’s eye—who was this guy? Some kind of super-hacker? Although, apparently not. “So that’s it? You can’t find it?”

  Zack frowned. “I don’t like the word can’t.”

  I didn’t either. But that’s where we were. Whether it was finding the Masked Cutter or finding who’d pushed Dante (and they were probably the same person), we weren’t going to get anywhere until we got the list of exes he’d invited to his wedding. They were the prime, obvious suspects, with an enormous, blatant motive blinking in neon green.

  Who else could we ask?

  “Grandpa!” cried the foursome of nieces and nephews at the far end of the shop. Ditching Tina and Mr. Charm, they tore through the maze of tables and launched themselves at the two most recent arrivals—Ambrose James and Frannie Endicott.

  Ambrose and Frannie were a pair of middle-aged locals who’d wound up dating after the most recent murders. That sounds weird… I don’t mean they dated because of the murders… well, actually, Ambrose had had this epic hopeless crush on the first victim… you know what? Let’s start over.

  Ambrose was this nice black gentlemanly lawyer in his sixties who walked around in suits and spoke with quiet emphasis. I’d only zapped him once, but I still occasionally felt bad about it. In my defense, at the time, I’d thought he was a murderer. Lately, that’s kind of my go-to reason for zapping a person.

  Frannie was my former boss, but we’d both gotten over it. She was a white woman in her fifties with tastefully blonded hair, and although she ran a store devoted entirely to luxury purses, any one of which could pay a semester’s tuition for a struggling college student, I was surprised to see her here in a tea shop, where she might actually have to spend money. Maybe Ambrose was paying.

  The swarm of grandkids engulfed Ambrose first, then shrieked a greeting to “Miss Frannie”. Frannie’s thin face lit up in a smile, but as the children turned back to Ambrose, the smile faded into quiet sadness. She looked upset and preoccupied, and I wondered why. It couldn’t be the drowning, could it? She was a bit too brisk and businesslike to get weepy over a man she’d barely known. Unless… she had?

  Ambrose was beaming at his clamoring team of grandchildren (along with most everyone in the tea shop) but he pushed through them to reach a hand out to Zack. Zack eagerly jumped up with a smile, towering over the older man, and they clasped in a hug.

  “And what are you up to?” Ambrose said, in his soft voice, peering at the enormous laptop screen. “Working? Here?”

  “Mr. Supergeek can’t find something for once,” Natisha put in.

  “It’s nothing,” Zack said. “Just the guest list for that wedding.”

  “The guest list?” Frannie snapped. “Why would you want that?”

  Then her gaze darted over to me, and she frowned. “Oh. I see.”

  Clearly, Frannie had very vivid memories of my previous investigation.

  “We were just talking to the sheriff,” I said, which was technically true. “It’s good to… explore all avenues. Just in case.”

  “I see,” she said again. She sighed, and glanced at Ambrose. “Well, I can probably tell you that.”

  “Really? How?” I blurted. “Were you and Dante… I mean…” I eyed Ambrose, but he seemed clueless.

  But Frannie’s eyes went narrow. “No,” she said, with incisive force. “But Lee’s my cousin.”

  “Oh! Wow,” I said, fairly astonished. And yet, as I studied her face… Frannie was a good ten years older than her cousin, at least, but I could see the resemblance. So that’s why Lee’s face had struck me as familiar. Huh.

  “So were you helping her plan it?” I said.

  Frannie’s face flickered with pain, and I realized that using the past tense might be a bit raw just yet, if she cared about her cousin at all. “Sorry,” I added hastily.

  “Thank you,” she said. Ambrose touched her arm, and she acknowledged the minute consolation with a tiny return touch that was like a shared kiss. The spontaneous, almost unconscious intimacy caught my heart. If I tried that with Cade…

  “I was not helping her with the planning,” Frannie went on. “I offered, but Lee has very… definite ideas about things.”

  “So how do you have the list?” I sai
d.

  Frannie pulled out her phone and started swiping. “Because Lee never could learn to send her emails with bcc.”

  Zack snorted.

  “What’s ‘bcc’?” said Tina. She had just made her way back over after the exodus of the grandkids, but she was lingering a few feet away from me, eyeing Natisha with caution. “Is it some kind of security thing?”

  “Blind carbon copy,” Zack said, pontificating with techie authority. Natisha rolled her eyes; looked like Tina was safe for the moment. “When you send a group email,” Zack continued, warming with gusto to his mansplanation, “you nearly always want to copy all recipients with bcc, not cc, to preserve each person’s privacy. With cc, everyone who gets the email sees the entire list of addresses.”

  “Right,” said Tina, clearly falling into a technobabble trance.

  “Here we go,” said Frannie, reading her phone. “I’ve got a whole stack of emails Lee sent about the wedding. And she’d always put the full list of names and emails in the cc.”

  “Perfect!” I said. “Can you send one to us? To, um, Tina?”

  It occurred to me that if I really zapped people because I saw them as a threat, is that also how I felt about phones? Before I’d come to Wonder Springs, I’d at least been able to use tech sometimes, but these days I couldn’t touch any kind of screen without totally frying it.

  Frannie cocked her head at me, intrigued. Then she looked at Tina. “I’ll send it right now. What’s your email, Tina?”

  “Email? Oh, right!” Tina said. She shifted Mr. Charm to one arm and dug a phone out of her tiny purse. She frowned. “I think I have an email. Don’t you have to set one up for your phone?”

  Zack groaned.

  “Oh, can you screenshot it?” Tina said. “And message it to me on Tribesy?”

  “I can’t watch this,” Zack moaned. “Give me your phone, please.”

  As Zack extracted Tina’s email from the labyrinth of settings, she leaned toward Frannie and read her screen. “I recognize most of these names,” she said. “They’re staying at the Inn. Small wedding.”