Hallow Haven Cozy Mysteries Bundle Books 1-3

by Mara Webb

  “Yeah, I think they said it’s this weekend,” Miller replied.

  “Darn it, why can’t they pick set dates for that thing?” Honey grunted. “Every year they just pick and choose, and it drives me bananas!”

  “Do people dig up your lawn every Shell’s Day?” I asked.

  “Not just my lawn, every darn lawn on the island. Have you ever been to a Shell’s Day, Sadie?” I shook my head. “Well, I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors. There are hearts everywhere, you take your sweetheart out for dinner and then there is dancing, music in the streets, flowers everywhere you look. It’s like if Valentine’s Day had a baby with the forth of July and then you gave that baby an energy drink.”

  “What does that have to do with your grass?” Miller said.

  “Well, Shell’s Day is based around shells being an early symbol of love, right?” Honey explained. “Then what replaced shells everywhere else in the world? Diamonds! Money! Gold rings! You name it. There is some ridiculous rumor that somewhere on Green Holt there is a chest filled with these things, some old pirate legend that Pete insists on telling everybody about.”

  “People are looking for buried treasure?” I said.

  “Oh yes, that way you get to ask Miss. Green Holt out to the Shell’s Day parade on the mainland. It’s not just a beauty pageant, Sadie, they have to all be proficient in fire building and there is a sword fighting round… there’s a lot going on,” she sighed.

  “Someone dug a pit in your grass looking for gold so they can date a sword fighter?” Miller repeated for clarification.

  “Well, when you say it like that is sounds stupid,” Honey smiled. “But it looks like they’ve decided that right there was the best spot to dig. I don’t know where they get their ideas from, probably got their hands on a knock off treasure map.”

  “Do you think they found anything?” I asked.

  “If those fools had found a treasure chest you would have heard the cheering from fifty miles away,” Honey laughed. “Feel free to see if they dropped any diamonds if you like, I’m heading inside to call someone to help me fill in that dirt and get some new grass seed.”

  Honey went back into the house and Miller jumped over the deck fence onto the grass.

  “Really?” I laughed. “Are you a treasure hunter too? Maybe this was what you heard last night, people digging for pirate’s booty!”

  “Don’t mock me!” he grinned. “What if I find a really nice sapphire or something? Are you telling me you wouldn’t want that?”

  “I mean… if you’re offering,” I smiled, jumping over the fence to land beside him. We walked over to the hole in the ground and stared down into it. “Wh—?” I stuttered. We weren’t looking down at soil, there was something down there buried in the dirt. It looked like metal, maybe a door, with a small round window in it.

  Honey came over to join us. “I have a guy that can get here in twenty minutes. He has his own spade which is obviously a bonus. I wish I had a touch more skill with green-fingered magic, but I would absolutely butcher this grass if I tried to fix this myself… what are you both looking at?”

  She peered down into the hole and recoiled in horror.

  “Do you know what that is?” Miller asked.

  “I…” she stuttered. “Yes, I think I do.”

  “Well?” I pressed.

  “A bomb shelter!” she shrieked.

  “Sorry, what?” I laughed.

  “When everyone was panicking about war back in the sixties, the president asked people to build their own bomb shelter. My mom told me that they only built one on Green Holt because everyone could fit inside, we’ve never had too many people living on the island. She showed me a few pictures of what it looked like; I think this is it!”

  Miller jumped down into the pit and the sound of his feet hitting the metal caused a strange, hollow sound to echo from beneath him. He crouched down to peer through the glass.

  “Here,” Honey said, tossing him a flashlight that she had just produced out of thin air with her magic. He caught it and switched it on to light up whatever was lurking inside.

  “Oh,” he called out.

  “What can you see?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s a bomb shelter alright. I can see food containers and all sorts down there. It sure is dusty. Can’t see any diamonds or gold coins though,” he teased. The window was so small that his view must have been restricted. “You’re gonna need to get me a phone, Honey.”

  “Why? Are you going to have the historical society out here or something?” she asked.

  “No, the police. There’s a body in there.”

  4

  Honey had made a noise that I hadn’t heard a person make before. It was a weird, stifled scream sound and she quickly covered her mouth to muffle it further. She had made the mistake of doubting what Miller was telling her, so insisted on looking through the small glass window herself. There was definitely a body in there and I could see that she regretted checking it out.

  I helped her back out of the hole in the ground and she hurried off to the house, hopefully to grab a phone.

  “Do you wanna see too? Or do you believe me?” Miller asked.

  “A little from column A, a little from column B,” I said, holding my hand above my head to shelter my eyes from the morning sun. “How gross are we talking?”

  “Pretty gross, but I’ve seen worse,” he replied. “This person has been dead for a while so, you know, not much but bones left.”

  “Any chance it’s just one of those plastic skeletons that people hang up for Halloween?” I asked.

  “Ha, you’ve not had a Hallow Haven Halloween yet, have you?” he laughed. “Let me put it this way, hanging up a plastic skeleton would be incredibly tame compared to what folks round here usually do.”

  “Right…” I groaned, quickly doing the mental math to work out how far away Halloween was.

  “I called them,” Honey yelled from the porch, she didn’t seem to have any interest in joining us by the bunker after what she’d seen. “They said they need to speak to you.” She pointed at Miller and waved a phone in the air. I offered a hand to help him out of the pit, but he had already pulled himself up in one slick move that made me realize just how strong he really was.

  He jogged across the grass and took the phone from Honey before pacing up and down as he spoke to the police station. I could vaguely hear him say things like, ‘you’ve got to be joking’ over and over. It didn’t sound like it was going well.

  I was standing at the edge of the pit and felt an overwhelming urge to inspect the inside of the bunker for myself. I jumped down onto the metal door and crouched to look through the glass. Surprisingly, I didn’t flinch when I saw the body. It was just as Miller had said, a skeleton. For some reason that bothered me less than any of the other dead bodies I’d seen.

  The skeleton was clothed, some type of fabric that hadn’t disintegrated over time. The handle for the bunker door was still covered with earth that hadn’t been dug away yet. I wondered what the plan was to deal with it, surely, we couldn’t just leave a body down there. But would we retrieve the entire bunker? That sounded like a lot of work.

  A figure standing at the edge of the pit blocked out the light and I looked up to see Miller’s silhouette. “What’s the plan?” I asked.

  “They’re not coming,” he groaned. “The preparations for Shell’s Day have begun and it seems that someone has butchered every rose on the island. They’ve had the petals pulled off or been spray painted brown. I know it sounds stupid, because it is, but people could riot if the event gets messed up.”

  “But there’s a dead person here!” I said, almost doubting that Miller had communicated that properly with his colleagues.

  “Yeah, but this is an old crime. It’s still a problem, but this clearly happened a long time ago so it’s currently not at the top of the priority list,” he explained. “Like I said, this Shell’s Day thing is very important to a lot of people, making sure it ru
ns smoothly will reduce crime, believe it or not. One year they ran out of heart shaped chocolates and someone went round letting the air out of everyone’s tires.”

  “Great,” I said sarcastically. “Do we need to get back to the main island then?”

  “No. They have it under control, or so they say. We still haven’t gotten to the bottom of why Pete was firing a cannon at Skerry and now we have this,” Miller said. “We need to get into this bunker somehow, see if there are any clues.”

  I already knew that this would be entirely on us as there was no forensic branch of the Hallow Haven police department. They didn’t have the fancy crime scene teams come in and dust for fingerprints or check for DNA on potential weapons. We had to come at everything like a couple of detectives from the distant past.

  If we got in there and there was no confession note, or a photograph of the killer committing the crime, then we were probably in for a rough ride. The first issue was the fact that the door was stuck under several feet of earth.

  “My friend with the spade is still planning to come, but I told him what had happened, and he has had to go into his happy place to find inner peace, or something…” Honey shouted. “He guessed that he’d be an hour at least.”

  After what I’d done to my hair, I was wary of trying to use magic to clear the dirt away. I would much rather manually dig than risk destroying the crime scene. Miller helped me up from the pit and pulled me close to him when my ankle wobbled on the edge of the dirt. His eyes were so dreamy… not the time!

  I let go of his hand and stepped back so that my mind could be free of the thought of kissing him. I needed to work out how best to approach the problems we were faced with.

  “Could you, you know, make a spade appear?” Miller asked.

  “Not confidently,” I smiled. “If we are waiting on the guy to help with the digging anyway, then why don’t we go see what Pete is doing with a cannon?”

  Miller nodded and we relayed our plan to Honey.

  “You’re going to leave me alone with a boney corpse?” she winced. “What if it leaps up and attacks me?”

  “Then we have a zombie apocalypse on our hands, and I wouldn’t know how to help anyway,” I shrugged. “I thought you were a…” I wasn’t sure how to end my thought out loud.

  “A witch?” she guessed. “Of course I am, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get spooked!”

  “Could you tell us where we can find Pete?” Miller asked, hoping to steer the conversation back to a relevant topic.

  “He’s probably on his boat, if not moping down by the lagoon. We’ve had a bit of an incident, but I think Pete is the best one to explain it to you. Do you know how to get to the lagoon?” she asked Miller.

  “Yeah, I’ve been there enough times,” he said. Honey was still reluctant for us to leave her, but we said our goodbyes anyway and wandered down towards the palm trees, following Miller’s internal map.

  “What do you suppose happened then?” I asked. “Has Pete shot at Skerry island before?”

  “What is the equivalent of ‘trigger-happy’ for a cannon owner? Fuse-happy?” Miller laughed. “I don’t think he is firing actual cannonballs, or at least I hope he isn’t. It’s more of a loud noise and a lot of smoke, the phrase ‘all bark no bite’ comes to mind.”

  “So, he is sending a message?” I mused.

  “Probably. The people on this island hate the people on that island and vice versa. The main island is definitely the friendliest place in Hallow Haven, and even the residents there can have prickly personalities,” he said. “Maybe the people on Skerry went paddling in the ocean on a day that they shouldn’t have, or they cooked a fish that made the air smell bad. Petty problems keep this place going.”

  It seemed that Miller was taking us to the lagoon first. I could see the ocean just beyond the tree line and the gap in the land where the water was coming in. The ocean was full of movement, but the lagoon was serene and a vibrant turquoise that felt as though it didn’t belong in nature.

  “Pete!” Miller shouted, waving down to the man on the sandy shore to our right. The lagoon was framed with white sand and Pete was laying on his back staring up at the sky, his sword still in hand. If I’d been dancing like he had last night, then my whole body would have been a wreck this morning.

  “This place is beautiful,” I whispered. I didn’t want to speak loudly and ruin the tranquility of the moment. Why hadn’t I brought a camera? This was the type of thing that Hallow Haven should have in a travel magazine; tourists would eat up pictures of this water. Maybe the people on Green Holt wanted it to stay as their little secret.

  Pete waved a hand in acknowledgment of our approach but didn’t sit up properly. Something moved in the trees behind him, and I stopped in my tracks. It wasn’t creating a shadow, but I could see eyes looking at me. I felt my heart start to pound as I stared at the shape, waiting for it to step out into the sunlight and reveal what it was.

  Miller didn’t seem concerned by it, which made me think he couldn’t see it at all. Pete was lying only feet away from the thing and was equally oblivious. I had fallen behind a few feet and ran to close the distance between Miller and I so that he wasn’t approaching it alone, but as soon as I started to run the thing retreated into the trees and disappeared completely.

  “I knew you’d be coming for me; I suppose firing that there cannon of mine is not what you’d call ‘legal’, eh?” Pete laughed. “You know, it’s hard to resist firing the darn thing. It’s so much fun. Would you like a turn?”

  “Not today, Pete,” Miller sighed. “Do you wanna fill us in on why you’re firing at Skerry this time?”

  “Well, I can show you if you like. No better way of describing it than by showing you with your own eyes.” Pete then did some strange flip maneuver that brought him from lying flat on his back to standing upright in one smooth move. Jeez, this old pirate man was built like an Olympic gymnast.

  He walked through the trees towards the ocean, and we followed behind, my eyes darting back and forth to check for signs of whatever had been staring at me only moments earlier. Soon we were back in the glare of direct sunlight and staring across the water at the island of Skerry.

  If I had to guess, I would have said that Skerry was a few hundred meters away. No great distance at all. You could probably swim there if you had to. Well, theoretically you could. There seemed to be a barrier preventing that sort of travel from being possible.

  “Have you guys dumped rocks into the sea to build a wall there?” I asked. There was a line of rubble that rose above the water and seemed to stretch far to the left and right of us.

  “That beauty is a mile long,” Pete said, proudly. “It was not rubble two days ago; it was a mighty wall that separated us from the unsavory types over there on Skerry. The thought of having to look at their rotten faces every day was clearly too much for the Green Holt ancestors, so they constructed a wall to keep them away, if I recall correctly.”

  “What did the people on Skerry think of that?” I asked.

  “They helped build it!” Pete chuckled. “They got the idea from Winston Churchill, of all people! Do you know Churchill?”

  “The British guy?”

  “That’s the one! He did something similar on the islands off the Scottish coast, or so I’m told,” Pete smiled.

  “But why are you shooting at Skerry then?” I asked.

  “Well, they’ve turned this wall into rubble!” he shouted, loud enough that the people on Skerry could likely hear him. “I think they are planning an imminent invasion and I for one won’t stand for it. I’ll show them what the people of Green Holt are made of!”

  Oh boy.

  5

  I stared at the crumbled wall and tried to wrap my head around the idea of building a wall in water. Had they used magic to construct this? It would be madness to think they had done this manually, right? It was so strangely uniform in the way it had crumbled, there wasn’t a clear spot that seemed to have been struck
by something. What did Pete think the people of Skerry had done here?

  “We should get over to Skerry and ask a few questions before you load up your cannon, Pete,” Miller said. “Can you hold off shooting at them for a few hours?”

  “Ya drive a hard bargain there, cap’n,” Pete snarled. I laughed to myself as Pete slipped back into his pirate language.

  “I don’t think I was bargaining with you, more of a polite request,” Miller grinned.

  “Aye!” Pete hollered, thrusting his sword skyward. “I’ll hold off for now but let them know that old toothless Pete won’t settle for any Skerry nonsense. There’ll be none of it on his watch!” He leapt up, clicked his heels together, then ran back into the trees waving his sword like he was charging into battle.

  “I can’t tell if he is harmless, or the most dangerous person in all of Hallow Haven,” I said.

  “Somewhere in between,” Miller nodded. “There are worse folk, no doubt.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think I’ve met anybody else here that has a sword and a cannon that they are actively using to fire at their neighbors.”

  “True. Ryder has that crossbow though, doesn’t he?” Miller said. I couldn’t read his expression, or sense why he had decided to bring that up. In the friction between Miller and Ryder, a lot of the trash talk was coming out of Ryder’s mouth. He caught me off guard.

  “I think so,” I lied. I knew full well that he had one. “Why?” I wasn’t really in the mood to get into a conversation about it but given that Miller had recently discovered that he was a werewolf and that Ryder had declared himself a werewolf hunter, it was reasonable to be concerned about the weapons in his arsenal.

  “Just wondering what he needs that for,” Miller muttered. “Unless you wanna scramble over these rocks, I suggest we take the boat.”