MOSTLY MURDER: Till Death: a mystery anthology

by Lawrence Block

  Contents

  The stories herein...

  Introduction (Patrice Fitzgerald)

  Nice Guys Finish Last (JC Andrijeski)

  Forsaking All Others (Chris Patchell)

  Starter (Samuel Peralta)

  Pride (Eric J. Gates)

  Two Faces (H.B. Moore)

  Loving Frankie (Patrice Fitzgerald)

  In Sickness and in Murder (B.A. Spangler)

  Nun of Your Business (Jerilyn Dufresne)

  The Long Haul (Josh Hayes)

  All Secrets Lead to Lies (Anne Kelleher)

  As Good as a Rest (Lawrence Block)

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Mostly Murder

  Till Death

  a mystery anthology

  Patrice Fitzgerald, Editor

  Elemental Press

  an imprint of

  eFitzgerald Publishing, LLC

  The stories herein...

  Nice Guys Finish Last (JC Andrijeski)

  Bobby came back from Asia with the perfect wife. Sexy, well-dressed… a dreamboat in every way. But he realizes something’s not right with his perfect-seeming marriage when things start to disappear. No matter how much he loves her, Bobby is determined to find out the truth about who and what his wife really is.

  Forsaking All Others (Chris Patchell)

  A home invasion turns deadly for Mally and Jack Gardiner, whose rocky marriage is built upon a twisted bed of lies.

  Starter (Samuel Peralta)

  A couple visits the perfect starter home. But beneath the veneer of new paint and windows, ghosts of the past await.

  Pride (Eric J. Gates)

  Marriage is a commitment, a strong bond if both partners work at it. Even so, sometimes external forces can wreck the best unions. FBI Senior Special Agent Thompson did not know his obsession with solving a case would bring deadly consequences in the last few weeks of his career.

  Two Faces (H.B. Moore)

  When newlywed Vivian Wood discovers that her husband disappears every few days without explanation, she’s faced with the reality that Simon is not the man she thought she married.

  Loving Frankie (Patrice Fitzgerald)

  He could be gentle and he could be rough, her Frankie, but Faith would love him till the bitter end.

  In Sickness and in Murder (B.A. Spangler)

  The first victim was found clutching buttons in his hand. But no one had to know where the buttons came from—and no one cared about the nameless, homeless man. And then a second murder was revealed. How far will a man go to protect the woman he loves?

  Nun of Your Business (Jerilyn Dufresne)

  Sister Mary Jordan has a problem. She has a husband. Not only that, he’s in the Mafia. Neither of those things is well-accepted in a convent. How she escapes the situation involves lies, murder, and just a little mayhem.

  The Long Haul (Josh Hayes)

  No one ever said marriage would be easy.

  A year after her affair, Mary and her husband have finally put the past behind them and are working on their future. Until she receives a letter that threatens to unravel everything they have worked so hard to fix, and brings her indiscretions full circle.

  All Secrets Lead to Lies (Anne Kelleher)

  One love triangle. Two dead husbands. Three detectives.

  A prison full of drugs. And so many secrets.

  As Good as a Rest (Lawrence Block)

  Lawrence Block has been writing and publishing novels and short stories for sixty years. “As Good as a Rest” is one of which he’s especially fond.

  Introduction

  by Patrice Fitzgerald

  Who doesn’t love a good mystery?

  Elements of suspense and mystery are present in most stories, even those that fall into completely different genres. The need to know—to race through a book to the conclusion when all is finally revealed and every intricate plot point is unsnarled—is part of the joy of reading.

  Collected here are eleven mysteries; ten of them brand-new. We are proud to include a classic short by Lawrence Block, New York Times bestselling author and Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, who has spent decades crafting brilliant novels and clever short stories. Also featured in this anthology are two USA Today bestselling authors, another who received an Indie Reader Discovery Award and won the Kindle Scout contest for a publishing contract, and yet another whose books have been picked up by Kindle Press.

  Open this collection and plunge into the stories… some grim and bloody, some light and even a little bit funny. You won’t know what you’re getting until you reach the end of each cunning mystery.

  Enjoy!

  Patrice Fitzgerald, Editor

  Mostly Murder mystery anthologies

  Nice Guys Finish Last

  by JC Andrijeski

  I discovered my wife’s true nature in our third year of marriage.

  It didn’t come upon me all at once.

  It happened over a matter of months, with me slowly putting the pieces together, reading the clues she left me, however faint or obscure or harmless-seeming on the surface. Eventually, I began to put together the language she was speaking to me as well, in her own quiet way. Where I am now, I’ve had a lot of time to think about these things.

  Eventually, I grew to understand that despite her sweet, loving and delicate exterior, by the end, my wife wanted nothing more than to annihilate my very soul.

  The motives troubled me at first.

  They troubled me a lot.

  See, I really loved my wife.

  My brother and a few of my friends joked that I loved her too much.

  We met over in the Philippines when I was stationed there for work, but she was actually Thai, from a village in the northeastern part of the country, and had moved to Bangkok to attend college. She just happened to be in the Philippines visiting friends while I was there. Her being in Manila at all—much less while I would be there and following a trail that meant I would cross paths with her in such a crowded and chaotic city—seemed like nothing less than sheer magic to me. I thought about that for a long time after we met, the number of things that would have to fall into place for us to be in one another’s lives.

  She was twenty, educated but had no money of her own, and her English needed some work.

  She confessed to me later that another man she met while in school in Bangkok, a businessman who came to Manila to set up a call center for an insurance company, paid for her air ticket. She told me that when she met me, she fell so much in love that she broke things off with him and offered to pay him back the full amount.

  I believed her. Men can be stupid that way.

  Either way, we were in love. I’m sure of it.

  I don’t think she could have deceived me to that extent.

  On the surface, she was the dreamboat girlfriend.

  Six months later, she was the perfect wife.

  Hot as hell—especially when I first met her. Long, silky, black hair. Full lips. Light brown eyes—so light, they were really stunning, as in double-take kind of stunning, as in can’t-look-away kind of stunning.

  She was on the small side in terms of her chest area, but I didn’t mind. She had long thin legs and a dazzling smile and she dressed so differently from the women I’d dated back in the States. No business suits or ponytails or clunky shoes or baggy T-shirts for my Kanya; she wore short skirts, low-cut blouses, high heels, full makeup, red lipstick.

&
nbsp; I never once saw her hair anything but styled or down, no matter what she was doing. She ate like a bird and didn’t drink or smoke. Unlike most of her American friends, she kept her figure long after we got married.

  I didn’t even mention it to her. She did that all on her own.

  Not long after we got married, my job moved us to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  It was a relief to be back in the States. Kanya was excited to be a real American, too.

  The lab where I worked promised me it was a real position this time, that I wouldn’t be moved again in a few months, either to another part of the country or another part of the world. I began to feel like I would be able to really build something in Albuquerque with my new wife, which was a huge relief after that whole incident in San Francisco.

  It felt like a fresh start. The freedom to begin again.

  Kanya was a big part of that.

  Like most people in those years, I was still suffering the effects of the tech crash. Everyone was hurting back then, especially when the rest of the market crashed a few years later, with the housing bubble popping, jobs evaporating, full-blown recession and everything else. Even those of us who managed to hold onto our jobs suffered, and I was no exception, despite my unique skills. My employers had me over a barrel and they knew it, so I pretty much had to go wherever they told me.

  I guess I was a little bitter until I met Kanya.

  It struck me as prophetic, almost, that they finally let me return home to do my job, and only a few months after the ink on our marriage certificate dried.

  I took it as a sign that things were finally turning around for me.

  For us. For the first time in my life, I was part of an “us.”

  I told Kanya I didn’t really want children right away, so she decided she wanted to go to school—first to learn English better, then to obtain a business degree. Or possibly something in the arts or graphic design. I supported her in that, and with a few phone calls and some work over her application and entrance essay, we got her enrolled at the University of New Mexico (or UNM) only a day or two before I started work at the new site.

  I was forty-six. She was twenty-one.

  I thought I was lucky.

  All my friends thought I was lucky, too.

  They’d all married American women.

  Career-obsessed ballbuster types, my friends’ wives had no trouble running down their husbands in public, arguing with anyone and anything who didn’t march in time with their self-involved bullshit. Their wives whined if they made less money than their husbands, nagged and lorded it over the poor bastards if they made more. They kept their men on such tight leashes half my friends had to text or call every five minutes just to keep from getting screamed at.

  Truthfully, the whole lot of them scared the hell out of me. I avoided being alone with any of them for more than a few minutes if I could help it.

  After most of those work and neighborhood dinners, I came home and counted my blessings, feeling more gratitude than I knew how to express for finding my beautiful Kanya.

  The day after one of those dinners, I bought her a new necklace with a diamond-studded bird on it. She squealed and clapped her hands.

  After the Christmas work party, I took her shopping for the day and let her buy anything she wanted at the outdoor mall on Uptown Blvd.

  She bought clothes of course… but she also bought things for the house. And for me.

  That’s the kind of wife she was.

  Really, in those first two years in Albuquerque, I can’t begin to express how lucky I felt.

  I came home to food on the table, a spotless house, her smile hovering over her slim body in a form-fitting emerald green dress… or maybe a pale blue one… or a white one or a red one or a indigo one. Kanya never minded listening to me talk about my day. She gave me foot rubs and back rubs while I told her about all of the crazy things going on with my job. She liked taking care of things for me. If I had any gripe, it’s that her cooking was way too Asian, with too much rice and spice and whatever else, but that wasn’t a big deal since we ate out a lot anyway.

  She handled all the household and yard issues without bugging me for money all the time, although I did let her hire a gardener and a weekly housecleaner when she went back to school.

  All in all, for those first few years of marriage, I was happy.

  Ecstatically happy, most of the time.

  Kanya was happy, too.

  At least, she seemed that way to me.

  Then, somewhere around the end of year two, I started noticing things.

  * * *

  First off, things in the house started to disappear.

  They weren’t all valuable things. Most weren’t even personally valuable things—meaning, things that may not have cost much but that I liked for one reason or another.

  Hell, a lot of them weren’t even particularly useful things.

  They were just… things.

  Most of it was just totally random stuff, stuff I knew had been there, and now, with no ready explanation, simply wasn’t. What bothered me more though, is that whenever I asked Kanya about it, she would just smile at me nervously and go back to whatever she’d been doing, whether it was cleaning the kitchen or cooking or putting away the shopping.

  Eventually, I had to confront her for real.

  Something about not knowing really nagged at me.

  Looking back on it now, I suspect some more animal, survival-oriented part of me was picking up on instinctual cues, sensing that I was in danger. At the time, however, getting the truth out of my wife felt more important than I could explain to myself. It became a quiet obsession of mine, and one night, I’d finally had enough.

  I remember that evening well.

  I’d just gotten off work. I’m the type who needs a lot of peace and quiet when I first walk in the door, even on a normal day, but that day, I needed it more than usual. I’d been stuck in meetings for most of the afternoon, with a particularly unreasonable and petty supervisor who, like most of my managers over the years, liked nothing better than to waste the time of his more highly educated and technically skilled employees.

  So yeah, I guess I was already in a mood.

  I really just wanted a beer and some silence, followed by something good to eat and then a peaceful evening with my wife for the rest of the night. I already knew what I wanted to tell her about that same boss over dinner. Maybe we’d order in, since I definitely wasn’t in the mood for spicy rice crap right then, no matter how much meat she put in it. I needed comfort food, like Mexican or steak or even pizza. I already found myself thinking there would be a movie after dinner, and a foot rub.

  Maybe more than that, if I got my second wind.

  It was raining that night.

  Not normal rain, like you see on the West or East Coasts, but desert rain, summer monsoon, like you get every year in that part of New Mexico. New Mexico rains never really made anything cooler for long, but they made the air smell really good—fresh and clean and strangely nostalgic, even though I’m not from that part of the world. It’s like you’re smelling the old world as the sun got beaten out of the mesa and dust and adobe walls by the pelting drops, catching the lingering scent of a simpler, more black-and-white life.

  Maybe a life more like what Kanya had, in that village in Thailand.

  You got lightning with those storms, too.

  Loud. You can’t hear much through that, for how loud it can be at times.

  People cranked up their televisions. Or, like me, they took their beers outdoors to covered patios that had high ceiling fans running nonstop during the day, at least while people were outside. They’d sit out there in the dark and watch the lightning play havoc over the Sandia Mountains and smell the past through the machine gun pattering of rain.

  Hell, you could probably set off a gun, and no one would hear it. Not while one of those storms raged directly overhead.

  The next day, it would be just as hot as it had been
the day before. The ground would be baked dry before you even got out of bed, and there’d be so little moisture in the air you could physically feel each inhaled breath sucking water out of your lungs and skin.

  But that night, the rain was still coming down.

  I sat on our porch in the dark, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette, which I try not to do around Kanya if I can help it. Even as tired as I was, I tried to be a good husband, since I knew Kanya hated when I smoked inside the house.

  That’s when I noticed the next thing missing.

  At that point in our mysterious, silent battle of wills, I’d counted only four things that I knew with absolute certainty had disappeared.

  The bird necklace I’d given her in our first year of marriage was the first thing I discovered gone. I asked Kanya why I never saw her wearing it anymore, when it used to be her favorite piece of jewelry, and when she was at school, I looked for it everywhere and couldn’t find it.

  Next I noticed the blender gone from our kitchen counter, after I asked Kanya to make me a margarita one night.

  Then one of the tablets we had between us disappeared.

  Then both remote controls to our television vanished, too.

  I’d broken down and replaced all but the necklace by then, but the mystery of so many disappearances over only five or six weeks had already started to nag at me. I couldn’t figure out why and how these things disappeared when only Kanya and I lived in the house.

  At first, when the bird necklace disappeared, I’d wondered if it was our cleaning lady, Manuela, so I fired her and instructed Kanya hire someone else. For a few weeks after that, I only let the new one, Rosaria, come on the weekends when I was there. I also had her turn out her pockets before she left. She never had anything on her, not so much as a piece of lint.