A Grave End

by Wendy Roberts

  The larger my belly became, the more attentive Garrett was, and there were days I complained aloud about his mothering, but the truth was I wouldn’t want it any other way. While I was on hiatus from looking for the dead, my dowsing rods rested on a shelf in our living room. They waited for the day when they’d be called to action again.

  The dead were much more patient than the living.

  * * *

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  Acknowledgments

  Great thanks to editor Deborah Nemeth, whose tireless efforts make me a better writer.

  About the Author

  Wendy Roberts is a mystery and supernatural writer living a super-normal life. Cloak and dagger are her bread and butter. She is the author of four novels in the Bodies of Evidence series, five Ghost Dusters mysteries, as well as Dating Can Be Deadly and Grounds to Kill. She is an armchair sleuth and a fan of all things mysterious. Wendy resides in Vancouver, Canada, where she happily tends to feral cats, rogue raccoons and writes about murder. She is always working on her next novel.

  Website: www.WendyRoberts.com

  Twitter: www.Twitter.com/AuthorWendy

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  Facebook: www.Facebook.com/WendyRobertsAuthor

  Also by Carina Press and Wendy Roberts

  Latte, Espresso, Cappuccino & Murder!

  Read on for an excerpt of

  Grounds to Kill.

  Chapter One

  There’s a superstition that says if the palm of your hand is itchy you’ll soon be receiving money. If that was true, I’d be a gazillionaire instead of an underpaid barista. Instinctively I felt my itchy hand might one day bring me luck. So far nada.

  Distractedly I rubbed my burning palm on the countertop while I concentrated on whipping up a large caffe mocha, no sugar, no whip, extra dry, half skim, half whole milk, with chocolate syrup.

  “Watch your back, Jen.” My coworker, Mitch, squeezed behind me to get to the cooler for more milk....

  Mitch was tall, muscular with golden hair and eyes like hot espresso. When Mitch worked Merlot’s Café saw a fifty percent increase in female clientele. The estrogen enriched customers flocked to flirt with him. They tended to hang around too long and talk too much but I didn’t mind. Mitch’s hundred watt smiles had a direct correlation to how the tip jar overfloweth and we shared gratuities. I reaped the benefits without having to sell my own soul with plunging necklines and pushup bras.

  My palm was itching even more so I snagged a wooden stir stick and scraped it roughly against my hand.

  “Eczema acting up?” Mitch asked, raising his eyebrows.

  I merely shrugged. No sense in complicating our working relationship by telling him that I was crazy.

  Mitch took a woman’s coffee order then elbowed me good naturedly.

  “Hey, look.” He indicated outside the coffee shop with his chin. “It’s your pal, Mr. Stinky.”

  He chuckled but I didn’t. My teeth clenched as I glanced out the coffee shop’s window. A disheveled homeless man was taking up his usual sloppy stance on the sidewalk across the street.

  “He’s not my friend.”

  I took an order for a medium, extra dry caffe mocha with raspberry syrup.

  “You say he’s not your friend but I doubt you’ve bought anyone else on the planet as many coffees as that guy.”

  Mitch was bent at the waist restocking the pastry case and was looking up at me with a smarmy grin. He was trying to be funny so I resisted the temptation to kick his keester and send him flying into the lemon scones.

  “Admit it,” Mitch chided as he got to his feet. “As far as coffee dates go, you and Mr. Stinky are on a roll.”

  “Right. You caught me.” I tucked a wayward strand of brown hair back into my loose ponytail.

  Normally working with Mitch was a coaster ride of wit made even more fun because he was so easy on the eyes. But it was only half way through my shift and my feet already hurt in my new espadrilles. Don’t mess with a girl with sore feet.

  “Oh you li-i-ike him,” Mitch teased. He elbowed me in the ribs as he passed.

  “You got me. I’m a pushover for skinny fifty-year-olds that smell like a Dumpster.”

  “Fifty? You think he’s fifty?” Mitch straightened, tilted his head and stared hard out the window. “I’d say a hard sixty.”

  A bouffant-blonde regular stepped up to the counter in thigh-high boots and an impossibly tight blue dress.

  “What do you think, Molly?” Mitch asked her. “How old do you think Mr. Stinky is? Jen says fifty and I’m going with early sixties.”

  “Who?” she asked, looking confused.

  “The homeless dude who’s been sitting across the street every day the last month or so.” When Molly continued to offer him a blank stare, Mitch added, “You walk by him every morning to get your tea.”

  Molly glanced quickly over her shoulder.

  “He’s there every day?” She frowned and blinked long false eyelashes. “I never noticed.”

  I poured Molly her usual peppermint tea but the steam rising came from between my ears, not from the small vent at the top of the plastic lid. Pushing Mitch aside I thrust the cup into Molly’s hand and took her two dollars. I gave her two bits in change and she deposited the quarter into the tip jar. Great, I could plan my trip to Hawaii now.

  “Thanks, Mitch.” Molly fluttered her eyelashes.

  Once Molly was out the door with her tea I picked up a rag and began energetically wiping down the counter and pastry case.

  Merlot’s Café was just one of thousands of independent coffee shops in Seattle. I’d been whipping up java here for nearly two years. It was located on the main floor of an old, five-story brown brick office building on James Street halfway between Yesler and Second in Pioneer Square. The place was owned by a seldom seen owner named Mervin Lo. Here at Merlot’s we served fair trade, shade grown, organic coffee usually with a smile. The inside was long and narrow with lots of exposed brick, a wide glass pastry case, half a dozen tables and counters with bar stools at the front windows. The walls were lined with framed black and white photos from long ago Seattle when vegetable stands stood where Pike’s Place sprawls today.

  “Amazing that she could walk by every day and not even see him!” I snarled under my breath. “Obviously her dresses are too tight and have cut off the circulation to the gray matter beneath her dyed roots.”

  “Nothing amazing about it, Jen. Hundreds of people walk down the streets of Seattle every day and I bet most of those don’t give the homeless a passing glance or a second thought.” He stood next to me and nudged my shoulder good-naturedly. “C’mon, even you must’ve had times when you crossed the street to avoid a panhandler or pretended not to hear the guy asking you for spare change.”

  “Whatever. Just drop it.”

  My gaze cut sideways to the guy across the street. It was starting to rain. My throat constricted. You’d think if you chose to be homeless you’d at least have the sense to thumb a ride south until you hit the California sun instead of hanging out in Seattle. The burning itch in my palm ramped up a notch and I rubbed my hand against my blue jean clad thigh.

  Mitch caught me staring across the street and said, “I told you when he started coming round a few weeks ago that if you fed him he’d keep coming back.” He paused. “They’re kind of like cats and for him...” He nodded across the street. “Coffee is like tuna.”

  “Shut up!” I slammed my palm on the counter, somewhat for emphasis but also to help relieve the itch. The half dozen customers in Merlot’s looked up from their newspapers and laptops to regard me curiously.

  We served
the last of the customers in a long line and I picked up a pen in my left hand to offer the itchy palm some solace. I doodled on the thick pad left near the register.

  “How come you write with your right hand but you always doodle with your left?” Mitch asked.

  “Guess I’m just talented.” I winked.

  I wiped the already clean counter and Mitch went off to make small talk with a petite brunette. After a minute I began to feel restless.

  “It’s slow.” I two-pointed my rag into a nearby sink. “I’m going on my break.”

  Mitch wisely kept any snarky comments to himself when I poured a large black coffee in a to-go cup, snagged a bran muffin from the basket containing the day olds and headed out the door.

  As I crossed the street I observed Mr. Homeless was still getting organized. He finished a smoke and ground it under his toe as I walked over. Placing a twelve-inch square piece of cardboard on the damp sidewalk he sat down crisscrossing his legs clad in dirty blue jeans. He had on a denim jacket and leaned his back against the gray slab of concrete of the parking garage behind him. In a death grip in his left hand he held the orange JanSport backpack containing all his worldly possessions.

  His eyes looked dead ahead at Merlot’s and he didn’t acknowledge me in any way as I dodged traffic and risked becoming the victim to an angry Prius driver as I crossed the busy street. When I was right in front of him I crouched down so we were at eye level. The stench of him brought tears to my eyes. At least I told myself it was the smell.

  A curl of steam rose from the vented lid of the hot coffee that I placed on the concrete sidewalk. He took the muffin from my outstretched hand and unzipped his backpack using a small yellow compass dangling from the center pocket zipper pull. He placed the muffin gingerly inside next to the oatmeal bar I gave him yesterday and the cinnamon roll from who knows when. Then he reached deeper to the bottom of the pack and pulled out two things: his usual worn paper coffee cup with “change please” scrawled in black Sharpie and a Lost Dog flyer. He placed the cup in front of him and handed me the sheet.

  I sighed, barely glancing at it.

  “Right. Lost black lab. Got it. You’ve given me the same paper every day for a month. You know that you don’t have a dog, right?”

  I ran an impatient hand through my hair, tugged out the ponytail then scrunched up my hair and pulled the elastic around it tighter than before.

  “Look, you gotta find somewhere else to hang out.” I dug in my pocket for a folded index card. “I’ve made a list of all the shelters and soup kitchens in the area. The one up on Third even has a daytime program. You could, you know, be inside all day. No more sitting in the rain. Wouldn’t that be nice? Plus, they’d feed you so, um, yeah...wouldn’t that be good?”

  I held out the card but he continued to look straight ahead. Not at me but through me. For a minute we stayed like that. Him staring. Me holding out the list. I’m sure he could’ve easily done this all day but I had a life. The rain ramped up from mist to drizzle and pasted my hair to my head and made my mascara run but did nothing to wash away his eau de toilet. Finally, with a small exasperated sigh I tucked the card into his donation cup along with a twenty I couldn’t afford.

  I was about to get to my feet then changed my mind and leaned in to snap my fingers in front of his face to try and get his attention. His gray eyes flicked to my face then away.

  “I don’t get it.” I threw up my hands in exasperation. “Why the hell do you come here every day if you don’t even want to talk to me?”

  He reached out a grubby hand and tapped the lost dog flyer I still held in my left hand.

  “The dog? There is no dog!” I crumpled the sheet and angrily tossed it at him. It bounced off his stained jacket and landed in his lap. With a deep calming breath I added, “You can’t keep coming here.” My voice hitched and I placed a hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, Dad, but you just can’t.”

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  Copyright © 2013 by Wendy Roberts

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  ISBN-13: 9781488053863

  A Grave End

  Copyright © 2019 by Wendy Roberts

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  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are n
ot even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

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