Murder Ghost Foul: The Complete Mystic Springs Paranormal Cozy Mystery Series

by Mona Marple

  The front door opens and in bursts Connie; Taylor Morton behind her, and Violet Warren behind him.

  “Sorted?” I ask, from the bottom step of the staircase.

  Connie nods.

  “Kim Kane’s on his way to county jail charged with first-degree murder.” Taylor says, removing his hat and dropping it on top of one of the suitcases. He looks tired.

  “Drinks!” Connie exclaims, disappearing into the kitchen. She doesn’t ask what anyone’s preference is, just pours a pitcher of raspberry lemonade and carries it into the sitting room with a tray full of glasses. She eyes me as the group make their way into the room, a bedraggled and exhausted gathering if ever I saw one. “Where are the girls?”

  “Doing a last check.” I say, glancing up the stairs. “Making sure they’ve not forgot anything.”

  Connie gives me a sad smile, which I can’t bear. I float across to the sitting room and take a seat at the table. This is what life will be like, I realise, when the girls leave. Connie and I, and the friends we have, sharing good and bad times. It won’t be so bad, I think, and the thought feels true.

  “I didn’t see it coming.” I say, taking the first step outside of myself and back into this life. “Kim, I mean.”

  “I know, I can’t believe the vegan thing was a lie.” Connie says with a shake of her head.

  “I don’t think it was a lie.” Taylor says. “One of the band ordered the steak. I think it was the one time Kim gave in to curiosity, and he got caught.”

  “And couldn’t stand the idea of his reputation being damaged.” Violet says, lips pursed. “It’s hard to live your whole life as one thing and then have that threatened.”

  “You did amazing.” Connie tells her, and Violet grants her a smile. “And it was pretty insane the things Vera said, about wanting to be closer to you. Think there’s any chance of that?”

  Violet considers the question just as Sandy and Coral thunder down the stairs and throw their arms around me, their dead mother.

  “Stranger things have happened.” Violet says. “Stranger things have definitely happened.”

  The blast of a horn from outside announces the cab’s arrival, and I take a deep breath. I wanted the girls to let Connie drive them to the airport, but they insisted we all had enough going on here.

  “Well, I guess it’s time.” I say, and I stand and pull them close to me.

  Taylor lets out a small cough and walks out of the sitting room, opens the front door and carries a suitcase in each arm out to the cab. The autumn chill bursts in through the open door and brings Patton with it, who paces anxiously in the hall way until my eyes meet his.

  “Come on in.” I encourage. “Don’t be shy. Give my daughters a hug goodbye.”

  He does, allowing the girls to decide the length and intensity of the embrace. He’s a good man, I’ve always known that, but I realise it now more than ever. Ready to step back and give me this time without a hint of jealousy. And I know he’ll step right back into my life to pick up the pieces when they leave.

  “It’s not goodbye, mum.” Sandy says.

  “It had better not be.” I say, firm voice hiding a hundred insecurities.

  “I’ll be back.” She says, her hand going to the swell of her stomach.

  “You’d better be. This grand-baby needs to know that ghosts are real.” I say, with a smile.

  “You know?” She asks, eyes wide.

  “Girl, of course I know. I’m your mother. I know everything.”

  THE END

  The Santa Claus of Mystic Springs

  A Mystic Springs Paranormal Cozy Mystery

  Copyright © 2018 by Mona Marple

  Cover Art by StunningBookCovers.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Love festive reads?

  Check out Christmas Corpse now at mybook.to/christmas

  For S:

  I can never thank you enough for your constant belief in me.

  For A:

  It’s all for you. Always.

  As an author, I rely on the help of readers to spot those pesky typos that sneak through on each book. Thank you to Nadine Peterse-Vrijhof for your help tracking them down in this book!

  1

  Sage

  I don’t know about you, but I can remember my earliest dream for my life. They say that your earliest dream is your life’s true calling. Like, no matter what life gets in the way and distracts you with, your childhood self will have told you what you’re meant to do.

  That’s why, if you go and see a life coach, they’ll ask you what you loved to do as a kid. So, I’ve just saved you a hundred bucks. You can thank me in compliments.

  My earliest dream? To be an adventurer. A free spirit. To spend my days wandering the world. I daydreamed about having no responsibility, which is probably a weird thing for a kid to dream of. I mean, that’s what kids are – free from responsibility, right? Well, not me and Connie. Not with how much our mum had to work in order for us to struggle just as much as we did and not one bit more. I watched that woman sweat and cry. One way or another, she was constantly leaking. And when she wasn’t leaking, she was dripping with grease. Ask me to think of my mum and the first thing that comes to mind is moist.

  The whole free spirit thing was a complete rebellion against the childhood we had, weighted down with things we couldn’t say and people we couldn’t answer the door to. My mistake, because clearly I didn’t achieve my dreams, was looking at boys and thinking they represented freedom when actually, they were just the first step along a path I couldn’t see. Boys to marriage to housework to babies to full responsibility. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t wish my girls away. I do wish I’d spread my wings before they arrived. Travelled. Seen the world. Tried my hand at working. Lived alone. Just had some fun!

  Connie had a childhood dream too - to be a mum. And she hasn’t had her dream come true either. That’s why it’s so heart breaking seeing how she won’t let herself get attached to Taylor Morton’s twins. Like she’s too scared of loving them in case the whole thing falls apart and they disappear from her life.

  I watch Connie return, empty-handed, to the room, fidgety, as if she’s lost a limb.

  “Asleep?” I ask. When she left the room, she had a baby in each arm. Scarlett, already heavy-lidded on her way to slumber while Axel, as always, did his best to resist any suggestion of sleep.

  She glances in my direction but not quite at me and gives a terse shake of her head.

  “You’ve left them with Ethel?” I ask, disapproval rich in my voice.

  “It’s why she’s here,” Connie says, as if that’s any explanation.

  “She’s too old-fashioned,” I say.

  “Take it up with Taylor,” Connie says. They’re his babies, she doesn’t say, but I hear it all the same. She moves to plump a cushion on the settee. Conversation over.

  “I’ve told you, I could help.”

  “Oh hush, you’re family.” Connie says. “Are we going out?”

  “Sure,” I say. “The babies could come? It’s not dropped too cold yet.”

  Connie stiffens, as if my words have wounded her. When she looks across at me, she’s boasting a smile as artificial as the Christmas tree in the corner of the room. “Come on, sis, let’s have some girl time. Just me and you.”

  I return her smile. I know when to stop flogging a dead horse.

  Bundled up against the winter chill, Connie looks more like her old self, the layers of padding imitating the extra weight she used to carry. She’s still plus size, but she’s a greatly reduced plus size, and her confidence is sky high because of it.

  We trudge down the street in a content silence. At least three neighbours are out on ladders hanging lights from the front of their houses. It
is, as they say, beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

  “Where shall we go?” I ask. This daily walk of Connie’s has been a routine for years, something she started doing before her clients arrived for appointments as a way of clearing her head. Her medium work has almost completely dried up now, since the whole of Mystic Springs can see spirits, and she’s enjoying the rare chance for a slower pace of life.

  “Shall we head into town? We could stop at Ellie’s?”

  “Yeah, okay,” I say. Ellie Bean runs the Screamin’ Beans Coffee House, which isn’t my favourite place to hang out, purely because I’m a ghost and ghosts can’t eat or drink. The whole coffee shop movement came after my death, and I can’t pretend I understand the appeal of paying several dollars for a drink you could make at home for a mere few cents. It’s one of many things I don’t understand about the modern world. The list also includes: teenagers wearing their trousers so low their pants are visible, airlines that charge one price until you want to add in extras such as a seat and baggage allowance, and reality TV. I don’t want to sound like my mother, but things were so much more simple back in my day.

  We walk past a house with an inflatable snowman on the front lawn. It bobs towards us menacingly in the wind. It must be 20ft high. Connie jumps and I laugh. The whole house is decked out with lights, and a life-sized sleigh stands on the roof, Santa sitting inside it and four reindeer in front of it. The Santa waves his mechanical arm every few seconds, the movement a little jerky, as if he’s seen better days.

  “Creepy,” I whisper.

  “It’s that snowman that’s creepy,” Connie says, keeping an eye on the huge blow-up. “Santa can’t be creepy.”

  I roll my eyes. I’ve seen some well dodgy Santa ornaments in my time, not to mention the Santa Fun Run that does a 5k race every Boxing Day. That thing’s the stuff of nightmares.

  “Look, I know you think Ethel’s a bad choice,” Connie says, “but it can’t be me all the time, you know?”

  “I know,” I say. “Her methods are so outdated, though.”

  “She’s got them sleeping better,” Connie says.

  I shrug. “Babies need love and affection more than a good sleep routine.”

  Connie purses her lips. We won’t agree on this. The conversation is pointless. Ethel Grubb is a well-qualified, vastly experienced nanny. The problem is she’s been dead long enough to gather cobwebs. And that means she’s a firm believer that children should be seen but not heard.

  “Taylor can’t afford a living nanny,” Connie explains. I’ve heard this argument a zillion times from her since Ethel was hired a few weeks ago, and it makes sense, until I remind Connie that she isn’t exactly working right now. Surely, she could look after the babies. She is their step-mum, after all. “Ethel has the qualifications, and she’s happy to take a roof over her head as payment. It’s an ideal solution.”

  Hardly. “Well, if you say so.”

  “Sage, these aren’t my babies, remember.” Connie says. Her trump card, she plays it in as many conversations as she can each day. She’s so used to saying it, I almost expect her to repeat it to Ellie Bean as her drinks order. A cappuccino please with a side of those aren’t my babies.

  “You’re dating their father, Connie. That makes you the closest they have to a mother,” I whisper. Connie flinches at my words and I wonder if I’m being too harsh. I remember the day when she realised she was starting the menopause. It wasn’t the hot flushes that bothered her, or the erratic menstruation. It was the realisation that she’d failed. She’d had one dream, and she hadn’t made it come true.

  Barren became Connie’s buzzword. She was barren. She always had been. And she felt the emptiness as if it were a physical pain, as if the lack of a pregnancy had a physical form. A tumour. And so, there are words I don’t say to Connie. I definitely don’t use the word mother to describe her or her potential. That word is like a dagger through her heart. And I don’t share pregnancy announcements with her, even as I know she will hear about them from other people. Perhaps that’s cowardly of me. But as the closest person to her, I can’t bear the devastation that that news causes her, the way it distorts her facial features as if she’s suffering a stroke. First, the mouth drops, then she fights desperately to regain control of her composure, to bring herself back from the brink, so that she can appear normal, happy, positively delighted for the parents-to-be.

  She’s always managed to throw herself into the act of loving on other people’s children with a barely perceptible sense of what-if, a cloud over her that only I can see. She loves children, in a general sense, in a way I never have. Presented with one, she can’t do anything but see that child as the miracle they are. But a pregnancy is different. A pregnancy forces her to live through the devastation again.

  Connie remains composed as she orders her drink, collects it, and carries it across the coffee shop to a seat near the window. Christmas songs play out and the man at the next table has a hideous Christmas jumper on. I try to ignore the sense of foreboding. Connie’s too calm. Maybe she didn’t hear me.

  And then she leans in towards me, her curls bobbing at the sides of her face, her eyes darting around the coffee house before resting on me. “I’m not their mother.”

  “I’m sorry,” I begin, but she raises a hand to silence me. I gulp.

  “I’m not their mother,” she repeats. “I need to remember that. I can care about those babies, Sage, and I do, trust me, but I can’t for a moment start to pretend that they’re mine. Don’t ask me to, okay?”

  I meet her gaze and nod. “I just…”

  “I don’t want to keep talking about it. Taylor chose Ethel, not me. It’s not my decision. I’m not going to parent them, you know? I can’t do that.”

  I blow out a long breath of air and find my courage. “But, Connie, if you’re committed to Taylor, don’t you think you need to do that? Is it fair for you to stay detached from them?”

  She purses her lips. “We’re just dating, Sage.”

  “Okay,” I say, but there’s no just dating for Connie. She’s been single for years. Taylor swept her off her feet without any of us seeing it coming. And he comes as a package deal, with two gorgeous little children who need a mother.

  Connie sips her drink, the froth leaving a moustache above her top lip. She gazes out of the window, looking simultaneously thoughtful and ludicrous, and I don’t have the heart to tell her. I watch her and think back to our childhood games. How she wanted to play dolls and I wanted to play travel agents. Growing up back home in England, the village had a travel agency shop and it was the height of sophistication to my child eyes. Posters of beach scenes and cityscapes adorned the windows, and the woman who worked there wore a dark blue skirt suit and a yellow and blue neckerchief. I could barely imagine the kind of people who went in that door and spoke to that woman, booked a holiday, boarded an airplane. Connie would stand next to me, her baby doll tucked in the play pushchair that she was really too old to be seen out with, and she’d rock the pushchair back and forth, never letting it idle. I swear there were periods when she was convinced that baby was real.

  “Penny for them?” Connie asks. Neither of us have adapted to American-English really, despite decades in the states.

  “I was thinking of that travel agent’s,” I admit.

  “In Waterfell Tweed?”

  I nod. “I wonder if it’s still there.”

  “I bet it’s not. Everyone books online now, don’t they?” Connie asks, as if I have any idea how people book holidays. While I was alive, I travelled abroad exactly once, coming over to Mystic Springs with my daughters to visit Connie. She organised most of it. By that point, I’d grown into everything I hadn’t wanted to be – provincial, naïve, and clueless. And yet I had the thing Connie most wanted; children.

  “I wonder what happened to that woman,” I murmur.

  “Which woman?”

  “The travel agent woman. Don’t you remember her? She was my role model growing
up,” I admit.

  Connie lets out a small laugh, wipes the moustache away with a tissue. Maybe she caught sight of it in the window reflection. “It’s funny the things we remember. I can remember the librarian really well, do you?”

  I look at her with a blank expression.

  “Mind you, that was when we were older. You were all for the boys by then,” Connie says with a wink.

  “Ugh, I had a first date in the library once, you know,” I say.

  “Get lost!” Connie exclaims.

  I raise an eyebrow. “I’m not a complete inbred you know, I can read.”

  “I know you can, you just don’t see the appeal of books the same way I do,” Connie says. “Go on, which boy was stupid enough to take you to a date in the library?”

  I feel my cheeks flush. I can’t believe Connie doesn’t know this story. “It was Bernie.”

  “You’re kidding?” Connie asks. “Seriously?”

  I nod.

  “What did you do, read aloud to each other?” Connie teases.

  “Ha ha. We sat in the back, near the local history section. There was never anyone down there.”

  “Don’t go into any explicit details!” Connie says in mock outrage. I roll my eyes.

  “Oh, please, we were kids. I don’t remember what we talked about or anything.”

  “Do you ever miss him?”

  “Nope,” I say, no time needed to consider the question. My husband is a memory that lives in the far recesses of my mind, out of focus and mostly forgotten to time.

  “Me either,” Connie admits, which is odd. Why should she miss him? “He was nice. But dull.”

  “Well, we can’t all be as fabulously interesting as me and you.” I say with a grin. She finishes the last slurp of her coffee and gets to her feet, bundles herself back into her layers. Fleece jacket, overcoat, scarf, gloves. She won’t wear a hat unless it’s absolutely unavoidable; her hair doesn’t stand hat-wearing very well.