Traveling Town Mystery Boxset

by Ami Diane

  He grunted something in response and rubbed a hand along a jaw covered in gray stubble. She noted for the first time since she’d met him that his mustache drooped and his eyes sagged with fatigue, a chink in his stoic armor.

  Will seemed to notice as well because he asked, “You okay, Sheriff?”

  “All-overish, but alight. Six is the thorn in my side. I’m fixing to serve my own form of justice on him soon if he doesn’t mind his.” He scanned the horizon. “You know, this country isn’t entirely uninhabitable. It wouldn’t be too cruel to leave him here.”

  The glint in his eyes said he was warming to the idea of leaving the outlaw behind in the next flash.

  “Aren’t those supposed to be temporary holding cells? Can’t the town just build a prison? ” While Ella spoke, her eyes remained fixed on Pauline, who now had one leg in Will’s boat and the other still in the skiff. The boats were edging apart at a rate that made the coroner do the splits in slow motion.

  Chapman nodded. “They are—or were from what I’ve been told. I’ve been meaning to bring it up at a town meeting, but it’s just not in our budget. And this,” he motioned a weathered hand at the two boats, “is something I don’t have time for.”

  “Sounds like you need a deputy.” He blinked at her. “Oh, no. I wasn’t offering.”

  “Good, ‘cause I need help making things better—not worse. I’d hate to see the body count if you worked for me.”

  “Well, considering I helped solve Kay’s murder—you’re welcome, by the way—maybe you should want me to work for you.”

  Chapman rolled his body around to check on Pauline’s progress. She’d somehow managed to get both feet in Will’s boat and was currently digging through her pockets.

  “Worst part is, I might have to let Six out soon.”

  Ella turned sharply. “What? You’re going to free Six?”

  It felt like a bucket of ice water had been dumped on her. The sheriff had warned her he couldn’t keep the outlaw locked up for long, but she’d expected at least a couple of months.

  The air hummed as Pauline fired up the motor on the skiff, and she aimed for the docks, towing Will’s boat behind it. Ella momentarily forgot about Six, wondering how the woman had managed to get back into the skiff so quickly. The two boats crept their way to the dock at a pace that suggested the rowboat was either very heavy or Pauline was in no rush.

  Chapman tipped his hat back with a lazy hand, exposing more of his face. There was actually a trace of regret and an even fainter hint of empathy in his expression.

  “Yeah, can’t keep him. All I could charge him with was burglary.”

  “What about attempted murder?” Will sputtered. “He tried to kill Ella.”

  “Still can’t prove that.” He sighed. “Look, I want him behind bars as much as you do—no. More than you do. But when I’m the law around here, it gets a bit murky, a bit hard to enforce things. I gotta keep the peace.”

  Ella stared at him, trying to figure him out. In one breath, he was the renegade sheriff who took the law into his own hands wild West style, while in the very next breath, he followed it to the letter.

  The roar of the motor carried across the water and reached a crescendo before Pauline maneuvered and cut the throttle. She threw Chapman the dock line for Will’s boat then moored the skiff herself.

  Both Ella and Will edged forward. The smell punched her in the face, causing her to try to breathe through her mouth.

  Without meaning to, she glanced at Stan and quickly turned her head to the side. He looked very un-mole-like at the moment. Some guilt bubbled to the surface for the way she’d treated him during their one and only encounter.

  “Any idea yet how he died?” she asked Pauline. Chapman’s eyes lingered on Ella a long moment before he fixed them on the coroner.

  “My preliminary findings are he drowned.”

  The air stilled. They shuffled their feet, no one speaking.

  The awkwardness seemed to go unnoticed by Pauline. She rooted through a couple of hip pockets before producing a shriveled orange. Her face puckered, but she tested the skin with a fingernail before it went back into a different pocket.

  “Drowned?” Chapman asked.

  “How’s that?” Pauline squinted at him as if forgetting he was there.

  “You said he drowned.”

  “Did I?” She glanced back at Stan. “Oh, right. Yes. That’s what it appears to be at the moment.”

  The sheriff tugged off his derby hat, ran a grizzled hand over his gray hair, and slipped it back on. “Mr. Tanner drowned in a few inches of water in the middle of a lake?”

  The coroner shrugged. “Like I said, preliminary findings. I’ll know more later.”

  “Is it possible to drown in that much water?” Will peered at his reflection in the bottom of the rowboat, most of it obscured by the body.

  Pauline shrugged.

  “Maybe he had a heart attack and keeled over,” Ella suggested. “Then drowned.”

  “Seems plausible,” Pauline said.

  Chapman turned to Ella. “You’re certain there was only one person in the boat?”

  “Positive.” She held his gaze, but when he looked away, she bit her lip. She’d only glimpsed the figure a couple of times during flashes of lighting. What if she was wrong?

  “Alright. As of right now, I’m ruling this an accident.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He rounded on Ella, his holster creaking with the movement. “You telling me how to do my job?”

  “What? No. It’s just that—”

  “Not every dead body is a homicide.”

  “I know. But isn’t it a bit suspicious that out of all the people to have died, it was Stan? There were a lot of angry people at that meeting. Couldn’t someone, I don’t know, driven another boat out there, drowned him, then returned?”

  “You confessing?”

  Ella pressed her lips together. The last thing she wanted was to be a suspect again for another homicide.

  He lowered to a crouch beside Will’s rowboat, and Ella could swear she heard his joints creak. “What time you say you saw the boat?”

  “Again, a little after midnight.”

  Chapman’s long arm reached into the boat and pulled up a bloated limb.

  Pauline hissed and said under her breath. “How many times do I have to tell him to wear gloves?”

  Tilting his head, Chapman twisted Stan’s arm, focusing on his wrist. “Watch stopped at 12:07.”

  A chill crept up Ella’s spine. Stan had died within minutes of her seeing him.

  “And you said his—or Will’s—was the only boat, right?”

  She nodded.

  Using both hands, the sheriff placed them on his knees and stood. “Until I have evidence to suggest otherwise, Stan’s death was an accident deserving of anyone stupid enough to be out in the middle of a lake during that storm.”

  He said to Pauline, “let me know what you find. I’ll send someone to help you with the body.” He brushed the brim of his hat then sauntered down the dock.

  “You know,” Ella said to no one in particular, “I think he’s starting to like me.” She didn’t have to look over to know Will was staring at her. “Yep. Besties, just you wait and see.”

  “Look,” Pauline said, “seems unlikely it wasn’t an accident. But if it was intentional, I’ll probably find defensive wounds of some kind.”

  Ella wondered how the coroner could make out anything when Stan’s entire body looked like a bruised banana.

  To her horror, her stomach growled as if the morbid picture had piqued her appetite. That’s what she got for skipping breakfast.

  “Could you pull DNA? Or will the rain have washed it away?”

  One of Pauline’s weedy eyebrows rose.

  “I watched a lot of TV before coming here.”

  “Ah. I’m from Galveston, Texas, 1993. To think of the advancements in forensics you must’ve seen.” Pauline stared wistfully at the distant horiz
on for at least five Mississippis. Ella cleared her throat. “What was I going to say? Oh. I took samples from his nails, just in case. But the problem is analyzing it without the proper equipment.” She waved her hands around. “Our resources are next to nil, not to mention severely limited by available technology. No chromatography equipment. No blood gas analyzer. Heck, thanks to the professor, I have a microscope. You and I are discussing things that haven’t been invented yet for most of these people.”

  She’d already told Ella most of this before, but she’d been two sheets to the wind at the time. Since Ella was partially responsible for that, she pretended like this was all new information.

  Stan’s watch triggered a thought for Ella. Her hand flew to her forehead, then she ripped out her phone. “Crap! I’m late for work.”

  She waved a goodbye then sprinted towards the bank.

  “Oh, Ella?” Pauline called. “I’ve been meaning to ask. Are boy bands still a thing?”

  CHAPTER 6

  ELLA PANTED AS she tore through the back door of the diner. Horatio looked up from the fryer from beneath a sheen of sweat. “Well, thanks for showing up.”

  The clock showed she was nearly an hour late. “I…sorry…Will…boat…” Her chest heaved between each word. She was as winded as Flo after a flight of stairs.

  “Alright, alright. Take a minute to catch your breath.” Grease popped behind him as he watched her with a worried expression.

  The diner door swung in, and Wink strolled into the kitchen in her own gingham waitress uniform, a scarf tied around her head like Rosie the Riveter and a Smurfette rolled into one.

  “Ella? You okay?” She ran some tap water into a glass and shoved it in front of Ella’s face.

  “Don’t you run all the time?” Horatio raised a heavy eyebrow. “Did someone chase you all the way around Lake Drive?”

  Ella gulped the water then wiped her arm over her mouth. “When I realized what time it was, I ran from the lake, changed, then came straight here. I’m sorry I’m late.” She looked at Wink. “Stan’s dead.”

  The large kitchen began to fill with the scent of a burning carnival. Horatio jumped to the waffle iron, letting out a string of words in Italian, and picked at the charred bits. He turned his head to the side, still listening to the conversation.

  Wink stared at Ella. “Dead? You sure?”

  “Yeah. I made sure.” She refrained from admitting she poked the body based on how Will and Chapman had reacted. Apparently, that was frowned upon.

  She gave a hurried recount of finding Stan’s body in Will’s boat, including the bit about seeing him alive in the middle of the lake during the storm.

  “And Pauline says he drowned?” Horatio dumped a misshapen piece of charcoal into the trash.

  “There was no mistaking it.” Ella squeezed her eyes and tried to push out the image of the bloated, bruised body. “But that was just her preliminary findings. Whether there’s more to it or not, she couldn’t say. Chapman thinks it’s an accident.”

  “Can’t say as I’ve ever heard of an adult drowning in just a few inches of water,” Wink said.

  A commotion from inside the diner interrupted their conversation. Ella was the first to reach the swinging door. After leaping into the diner, she skidded to a halt, trying to make sense of the war zone around her.

  Chester sat on top of the soda fountain, chittering loudly in a blue button-down shirt, not unlike one she’d seen Sheriff Chapman wear often, complete with a gold star over the chest akin to a badge. His petite front paws shoveled bits of vanilla custard crème Brûlée French toast into his mouth, crumbs and syrup falling all over his “uniform.”

  A woman with dark hair and traditional Japanese clothing that looked like they’d come straight from a museum pointed and yelled in Japanese at the squirrel.

  Ella apologized profusely, trying to calm her down, while behind her, Wink lectured Chester and tried to grapple the partially eaten French toast from him.

  “I’m sorry again,” Ella said, coaxing the woman back to her booth.

  “You get down here right now, mister! You’re in big trouble!”

  Ella didn’t bother looking back at the soda fountain. “He’s usually so well behaved.”

  Wink continued to scold the squirrel. “Why are you always so naughty? What’s gotten into you?”

  Ella cleared her throat and raised her voice over Wink’s. “We’ll bring out a new meal, free of charge. Was that the morning special?” They’d stopped serving it twenty minutes before, but she wasn’t about to mention that. Even if she had to twist Horatio’s or Wink’s ear off, they’d make another batch.

  The woman’s face was still flushed, and she spoke in rapid Japanese, but Ella, with her limited lexicon of the language, caught a word here and there. It was enough to confirm her suspicions that the woman came from a century as antiquated as some of her vocabulary choices. It also proved that obscenities never went out of style.

  After Horatio had whipped up a new, artery-clogging meal, the chaos calmed down until the lunch rush hit. As with Kayline’s murder a couple weeks before, the diner was packed with what seemed like the entire town as news of Stan’s untimely demise spread.

  It didn’t surprise Ella that word had traveled like a sneeze. What surprised her was that it had taken a couple of hours.

  In a small village lacking TV shows and the internet, entertainment was in short supply. Or rather, they were forced to drum up their own.

  At one point, Ella managed to pour herself a cup of sludge from the carafe, shove a homemade donut into her mouth, and listen to two women at the lunch counter clucking about Stan. One wore a garnish hat that held half a garden atop it while the other had brows that were allergic to tweezers.

  “Ain’t natural,” Garden Head tsked. “Them turbine things are an abomination. An eyesore.”

  Unibrow cackled. “It’s ungodly using so much electricity. What’s wrong with a little bit of kerosene, hm? Or a candle? Keeps us humble, I say.”

  “Well, good riddance, I say.”

  Ella caught tidbits from other conversations as she delivered more plates of food to various patrons. Overall, the general consensus of wagging tongues was that Providence had taken care of the beady-eyed man.

  There was also plenty of speculation on how he’d drowned—the details of him being found in the boat hadn’t yet circulated—and what would happen with the wind farm expansion project now that the one spearheading it had passed.

  Ella worked until closing time, letting Wink go home early. They’d been so busy, she hadn’t had a chance to get a bead on Wink’s feelings about Stan’s death.

  She shooed the last of the customers out ten minutes after closing, finally flipping the sign around in the window and leaning against the glass. Her ears rung from all the gossip, and her feet felt like they’d run a marathon. All she wanted to do was collapse in a booth, but the prospect that she might never get up again was very real.

  Dragging her sneakers over the checkered linoleum floor, she closed the back door and locked it. She’d sent Horatio home five minutes before eight.

  Her thoughts wandered back to Stan in the boat like they had all day. Had he had some kind of stroke?

  Try as she might to forget, Chapman’s news that he might have to release Six soon sent her gut squirming and threatened her with a repeat peek of her dinner.

  Six Shooter would be free soon. Six, who’d almost killed her and probably blamed her for getting him locked up.

  The floorboards in the inn creaked and sighed beneath her feet. The mansion was as exhausted as she felt. Reaching for the knob, she jumped when Fluffy meowed from the shadows at the end of the dark hallway. Six had her on edge, jumping at every noise and shadow.

  The feline’s claws clicked over the hardwood floor as she waited for him with her door open. Once his tail cleared, she shut it. Her hand lingered over the knob then turned the lock.

  Tuesday proved to be far less of a headache than the day
before. The diner was busier than its usual, weekday self, with lingering gossips that hadn’t had it out the day before, but Ella managed to squeeze in an early break.

  After wiping the floor of strawberry milkshake courtesy of a five-year-old, she poured herself some coffee, fixed it with cream and sugar, and settled into a booth with one of Wink’s chicken pot pies. After the diner owner finished with a customer at the register who paid by taking a pile of cloth napkins to launder, she sat across from Ella. She’d just taken a sip of her own coffee when the door opened.

  Both Ella and Wink turned to greet whoever it was.

  “Oh, it’s just Flo.” Ella’s fork broke the crust of the pot pie. Steam rose and curled out.

  Flo mimicked Ella’s voice, a whole octave higher than it actually was. Then, she scooted Ella aside with her wide hips. “Move over.”

  Ella glared and pulled her food and coffee over to her new seat. “What are you doing here? Couldn’t find anyone else to annoy?”

  “‘Course I could. You’re just special.” Without a word, Flo reached across and grabbed Wink’s coffee. “Just the way I like it, thanks.”

  “Yes,” Ella said for Wink. “I’m sure you’re exactly who she had in mind when she poured it.”

  Wink waved her away. “It’s a lost cause, Ella. Believe me, I’ve tried. Can’t teach manners to a swine.” She got up and poured another cup of mud and rejoined them.

  “So,” Flo began, “I missed all the scuttlebutt yesterday. Someone want to fill me in?”

  Ella had just taken a rather large bite without testing it with her tongue first. Her hand now danced in front of her mouth, waving off the potential flames from shooting out. Already, she could feel tastebuds dying. She shot Wink finger guns, indicating for her to talk.

  “What is wrong? Are you dying?” Flo slapped Ella on the back.

  Normally, she would’ve appreciated Flo being concerned for her well-being. Unfortunately, her attempt at dislodging whatever wasn’t in Ella’s throat actually served to lodge something in it.

  Ella hacked and coughed until a chunk of pie crust moved from her esophagus. “Kittens, Flo. You need to take a first aid class.”