Booked 4 Murder

by J. C. Eaton

  “No, Mother. According to Nate, it was a regular bank account with a national bank. The account holder was Izzy Bay Beboi, and it had a tax identification number, not a social security number. The three of them must have set up a fake company. That’s why it was virtually impossible to find. And technically, no crimes were committed. Not by them, anyway. I tried not to picture Rolo getting arrested for computer hacking. So unless Jerry, Tom, and Peg don’t pay taxes, they’ll be off the hook. By the way, do you think Jeanette and Leslie are going to be in a lot of trouble? And Joanne? And what about the pool ladies?”

  “Nah, they’ll probably all get probation. That’s all anyone gets these days. What time’s your flight tomorrow?”

  “Five-seventeen. Terminal Three. I need to be on the road by two in order to return the rental and give myself enough time to get through security. By the way, I’m really glad you insisted on my visit. In spite of all the craziness, this was a heck of a lot of fun.”

  My mother smiled and helped herself to the salad. For the first time in a week, we had a leisurely afternoon and a nice, relaxing evening. I made sure of that by taking the phone off the hook when my mother wasn’t looking.

  Of course, the book club event was televised on all four local stations. I appeared for less than five seconds, compared to Vivian, who got lots of airtime.

  “Don’t worry about it, Phee. It’s that way with celebrities.”

  “Believe me, the less publicity I get, the better.”

  I meant it, too. I wanted to return to my normal routine in accounts receivable. Yet, oddly enough, things don’t always work out the way you have them planned. The next morning, when the paper arrived, there was a little feature notation on the top of the front page. It read:

  BOOK CLUB CURSE CRUMBLES

  UNDER MN SLEUTH’S SCRUTINY

  In the split second it took for me to read it, I knew my life would take a different turn. What I didn’t know was how.

  Chapter 31

  Two months later

  Mankato, Minnesota

  I was sitting at my desk, back in accounts receivable, and sifting through some department receipts. I was so engrossed I didn’t even hear Nate approach. It was good to get back to normal. Although, I had a nagging feeling something was missing. My work seemed dull in comparison to the exhilaration I felt when I was tracking down the book curse. I hated to admit it, but I missed the excitement.

  My mother had told me Gretchen resigned from her position as librarian and was on a book tour with Jerry White, Thomas Nolan, and Peg Nolan, promoting their latest endeavor, a self-help book for self-published authors, entitled Unconventional Marketing Strategies for Self-Publishing. She neglected to tell me just how popular they were.

  “Have you seen this, Phee?” Nate announced as he slapped a copy of USA Today on my desk. “Thought you’d get a kick out of it.”

  I was startled for a second and then took a look at the paper. I was staring at the business section, where the lead article read, “Unconventional Marketing Strategy Pushes Novel to NY Times Best-Seller List.” The Twelfth Arrondissement had reached number one.

  “Guess whoever came up with that marketing strategy knew what they were doing,” Nate said as I read the article for the second time.

  “Yeah, it’s just too bad two people died as a result of their ambitions.”

  “I don’t know. I think the book curse idea was the cover up, but the actions would have happened anyway. Listen, I didn’t stop by just to show you the article. There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Sounds serious.”

  “Serious. Not fatal. I wanted you to know I put in my retirement letter, effective January one. I’m starting my own business in private investigating. I even put down a deposit for office space.”

  “Wonderful, Nate! You’ll be spectacular.”

  “That’s not all. I want you to consider joining me.”

  “To do your accounting?”

  “Uh-huh. I wouldn’t trust anyone else. But here’s the caveat—it’s in Arizona!”

  “What???”

  “That office I’m renting is not too far from Sun City West.”

  As soon as he said those three words, my stomach began to churn. It would mean I would be living so close to my mother she’d think nothing of coming over to rearrange my kitchen cabinets or vacuum the rug.

  I’m sure Nate could see the tension on my face. “Come on, kiddo. Give it a try. I always told myself when I retired I’d move to a place where I wouldn’t have to put up with ice or snow. You could easily rent out your house to one of the officers in Mankato.”

  “I, uh, um . . .”

  “Look, you don’t have to commit right away. Think about it. You could take an unpaid leave of absence for a year and work for me. I’ll match your salary and benefits. Oh, what the hell! I’ll do better than match them. You see, I’ve been saving up for a long time and, thanks to a few very healthy investments, I’m able to pull it off. If you don’t like it, you can always return to your present job. If you do like it, and I know you will, you can take early retirement from Mankato. You’ve got twenty years into this place. So, what do you say? Will you give it some thought?”

  I was stunned. Flabbergasted. All I could do was stare at Nate with my mouth open.

  He chuckled. “I’m just asking that you give it some real thought. Okay, kiddo? Besides, you don’t want a repeat of the Super Target incident last winter when you fell facedown on the ice. There’s no ice in Phoenix.”

  The Super Target incident. Why did I ever tell him about it in the first place?

  I paused for a second and took a breath. “Just the accounting, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m not an investigator.”

  “I know.”

  “I want my own office. Or at least my own cubbyhole.”

  “Done!”

  “And call monitoring so I’ll be warned if my mother’s on the other end.”

  “Done!”

  “And one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you never accept a case from my mother.”

  “Done!”

  As things turned out, two out of three wasn’t bad.

  If you enjoyed BOOKED 4 MURDER

  by

  J.C. Eaton

  More Sophie Kimball Mysteries

  are on their way!

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  in December 2017!

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  Chapter 1

  Peoria, Arizona

  “Listen to your mother for once, Phee. Hold off on turning on that air conditioner. You should wait as long as you can so you don’t pay a fortune to those utility companies.”

  “Maybe you can put it off, but you’ve been living out here for at least a decade. Your blood’s probably as thin as water. Mine’s not.”

  “Well, it won’t thin out unless you put it to the test.”

  “I’m not going to sweat to death to prove a point,” I said. “I’ve only been out here a few months and my blood’s as thick as sludge. Heavy Minnesota sludge. Or have you forgotten what it’s like back there?”

  “Forgotten? I can’t even look at a Norman Rockwell holiday card without shivering. Trust me, honey, you’ll get used to the heat.”

  This, from the woman who installed a small portable air conditioner in her back bedroom for the dog.

  It was a conversation I’d had a few days ago with my mother, Harriet Plunkett, and it was a typical one for us. Very little had changed since then. Until the murders. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I stood at the thermostat, debating whether or not to break down and turn on the air-conditioning like I did every summer back in Mankato, Minnesota. But this wasn’t summer. It was late April. April in Peoria, Arizona, and approaching ninety-five degrees. The ceiling fans in my small rental casita could only do so much.

  I made the move to Arizona so I could h
andle the bookkeeping for a friend of mine, Nate Williams. He was a retired police officer from Mankato who started his own private investigation firm near Phoenix. Nate convinced me to take a year’s leave of absence from my job in accounts receivable at the Mankato Police Department and move to a place where I’d never be bothered with snow or ice again. All he had to do was remind me of the Super Target incident the winter before and he knew I’d jump at the chance to move to Arizona.

  The humiliation of opening my car door, taking a step, and falling face-first on the icy pavement still appeared in my nightmares. The worst part was being unable to stand and having the two twenty-something guys from the car next to mine hoist me up and plop me back into the driver’s seat. Worse yet, they kept calling me “ma’am.”

  Ma’am. When did I become a ma’am? I was only in my forties. And I can still pull off a two-piece at the beach. Maybe if it wasn’t winter and I didn’t have a bulky coat and long scarf covering up my figure, they wouldn’t have used that awful word. And why did I tell Nate about the stupid incident in the first place? It gave him leverage. Leverage he used to talk me into moving near my mother in Arizona. I still remembered every word he said.

  “Come on, kiddo. You don’t want another icy parking lot incident, do you? You’ve got nothing to lose. Your daughter’s teaching in St. Cloud, your ex-husband has been off the grid for years, and nothing is holding you back. Besides, you’ll love the area. And you’ve got the advantage. You’re already familiar with it.”

  “I’m familiar with my mother’s small retirement community. And it’s a wacky one at that. Or have you forgotten?”

  “How could I possibly have forgotten about Sun City West’s book curse and all those unrelated deaths that scared everyone in a fifty-mile radius of the place? We can thank your mother’s book club for that.”

  “So now, you want me to live there? Near all of my mother’s friends? The same batty crew from Booked 4 Murder? That’s the name of their club, you know. I think my mother thought it up. Anyway, those women had me chasing all over the place a year ago to find a nonexistent killer. That’s where you want me to live?”

  “Not there. Near there. You’re much too young to think about retirement communities.”

  “If that’s your way of buttering me up, you need to do better.”

  He did. Nate Williams upped my salary, helped rent out my house to a young police officer and his family, and paid for all of my moving expenses. He also helped me find a fabulous casita in Vistancia, a multigenerational community in Peoria, not too far from Sun City West.

  Now I was standing in front of my thermostat wondering how I could have been bamboozled into relocating to an area where a hundred and three degrees was described as “warm.” As my fingertip reached for the button on the thermostat, the phone began to ring. An omen. An omen telling me to wait another few days and save on my electric bill.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t a sign from another realm; the caller ID made it clear it was my mother. I massaged my right temple and stared at the phone. My mother was calling to moan and groan about the latest disaster in her life—my aunt Ina’s wedding. As if I didn’t get an earful yesterday. At least it wasn’t as bad as the day before, when my mother went on a tirade insisting Aunt Ina was trying to take over the book club. That was a one-sided conversation I could’ve done without.

  “Your aunt Ina will drive us all to the brink with her endless lists, her obscure authors, and her constant need for attention. Be happy you’re an only child.”

  An only child who gets 100% of Harriet Plunkett’s complaints.

  “We’ve told her time and time again we like to read cozy mysteries. Maybe a British whodunit once in a while, and what does she suggest? I’ll tell you what she suggests—mysteries translated from godforsaken languages like Hungarian or Romanian. Romanian. That’s a language, isn’t it? Well, one thing’s for sure, reading those things would be like watching a Swedish movie with subtitles. We’d be snoozing before they even found a body.”

  “Um, yeah, well . . .”

  “And one more thing, she suggested having us arrive in the attire of the day, according to the book.”

  “Huh? The what?”

  “Oh, you heard me. She wants us to dress up like the characters in the book according to when that book was written. Honestly, the library committee would have us locked up if we arrived to our meetings looking like we stepped out of another century. Even Shirley thought it was extreme, and she goes for all that new age stuff. Then Ina goes and says it’s no different than the Red Hat Society. No different? We’d be known as the lunatic fringe ladies.”

  The phone was now on its fourth ring and I had to make up my mind. In a moment of weakness I picked it up. I should’ve pushed the thermostat button instead.

  “Phee! It’s about time you got home. You never worked so late when you were in accounts receivable. This new accounting job is really eating up your time. Anyway, I just wanted to give you the latest on the wedding. Your aunt Ina decided to wear white. White. I honestly don’t know what’s come over my sister, but all of sudden she’s acting like she’s twenty instead of seventy-four. And white! She’s not supposed to wear white. This is her second marriage. Before I forget, your cousin Kirk and his wife are flying in from Boston. I wonder what he has to say about this. . . .”

  Finally, a pause. My mother actually paused, and I could say something.

  “I’m sure Kirk is thrilled for his mother. Look, Aunt Ina was always a bit eccentric. It was Uncle Harm who kept her in line all those years, and even he could only do so much. I say if she wants to wear white, let her wear white. It’s not like there are any rules or anything. So, are all the other arrangements made? The invitation wasn’t too specific.”

  “Not too specific” was an understatement, even for me. The invitation was a coiled message written on a small, round piece of parchment paper. It reminded me of an enchantment bowl I had seen once in the ancient cultures section of the Art Institute of Chicago. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a docent on hand to explain my aunt’s invitation. It read:

  It took my mother a half hour to figure out the 14th of Sivan was a date on the Hebrew calendar that coincided with May 28. Then another half hour to complain.

  “Who writes a date like that? At first I thought Sivan was Aztec or maybe Incan. Possibly Tibetan. Finally, I dredged up the Jewish calendar from the Sinai Mortuary and lo and behold—it was Hebrew.”

  I took a breath as my mother continued to vent about my aunt.

  “The arrangements? You want to know if the arrangements were made? Oh no, that would make it too easy for the rest of us. And her husband-to-be seems just as fly-by-the-wind as she is. He’s a musician, you know. Plays the saxophone. Worked for years in one band or another on cruise ships. Divorced three times. Three times!”

  As much as I hated to admit it, my mother was right about my aunt Ina. Every family has one member who, shall we say, “dances to their own drum,” but in Ina’s case, she’s been pounding on the entire percussion section ever since I’ve known her. My aunt Ina had never grown out of the “hippie phase,” as my mother referred to it. From the gauzy white skirts she wore with peasant blouses and fetish necklaces, Aunt Ina had a style all her own. At seventy-four, she still braided her long gray hair and wrapped it on top of her head like the old German women did in the eighteenth-century paintings. Only they didn’t put flowers, ribbons, or bits of tinsel in their braids.

  I was picturing Aunt Ina with a floor-length gown and white tinsel in her hair when my mother continued to complain.

  “And when does she pick to get married? When? One of the hottest weekends in the valley—Memorial Day! She picks Memorial Day. That’ll cost your cousin Kirk a fortune on airline tickets. And that’s not the worst of it, Phee. Not by a long shot.”

  “Why? What do you mean?”

  “You said the invitation wasn’t specific. Well, here’s specific for you—They’re getting married at dawn in the Petr
oglyph Plaza in the White Tank Mountains.” “The Petroglyph Plaza? You mean the old Indian ruins in the state park?”

  Even I was getting concerned. This was extreme, even for Aunt Ina.

  “Oh yes. We can all sweat to death as we schlep up the mountain. And I emphasize ‘death.’ Who’s going to come?”

  “Mom, the White Tank Mountain Park is a few minutes from your house and we can drive straight up to the path that leads to Petroglyph Plaza. It’s only a quarter-mile walk from the parking lot to the ruins.”

  “A quarter mile? What’s the matter with you? I’m not walking a quarter of a mile because your aunt has lost her mind. And what about the book club ladies? They’re not about to get winded either.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mother, all of you walk farther than that when there’s a good sale at Kohl’s. Besides, I’m sure they’ll arrange for golf carts or something.”

  “You know your aunt Ina and details. We’ll be lucky if they remember to bring water.”

  I took a few slow breaths, something I’d learned in a Tai Chi class once, and answered before my mother could continue. “Don’t worry. Aunt Ina will have all the arrangements made. Do you know why she picked that spot?”

  “Seems she and her future husband wanted to get married where they met. We’re just lucky they didn’t meet on some footbridge that could have collapsed and sent us all into a creek.”

  I tried to change the subject before my mother took everything to the extreme. “So, where are Kirk and Judy staying?”

  “Your aunt reserved some godforsaken place near the mountain. Called it quaint. What was it? Oh yes, ‘The Cactus Wren.’ And they want all of us to stay there for the weekend.”

  “It sounds nice, Mom. A quaint little bed-and-breakfast overlooking the White Tanks.”