GRANNY SNOWS A SNEAK
(A Fuchsia, Minnesota Mystery)
by
Julie Seedorf
Author’s Note: Granny has become dear to my heart. In the beginning with the first book in the series, Granny Hooks A Crook, it may seem as if Granny is an old, memory flawed, fluffy old lady ready to be put out to pasture. Her character develops over time and in the books that follow. There are layers to Granny that no one would suspect and in the Fuchsia Minnesota series, we are peeling back the layers to see why Granny is who she is today.
We all have layers in our lives that are hidden. We may hide them because we are afraid. We may hide them because we want them to be forgotten. We may hide them because we have to get through the life we are living each day without revealing what is underneath the why’s of what we do, what we do in the way we live our life. In many ways we are no different than Hermiony Vidalia Criony Fiddlestadt. The challenge for all of us is to let our little light shine, rejoicing in our true character and being who God intended us to be.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank Patricia Rockwell and Cozy Cat Press for believing in me. Annie Sarac, thank you for your honesty and your editing skills.
Thank you also to Boneyard Coffee and Tea in Champaign, Illinois, for allowing the use of their business name in my book. I also say thank you to my readers, Sally and Tami, for creating the winning name for the new Ella’s Enchanted Forest in the book––Sally for the Pink Percolator, and Tami for the Coffee and Confections part of the name. Finally, I would like to give a big shout out to the rest of my readers who entered the contest.
DEDICATION
I dedicate this book to my Grandmother, Edith Young. Her likeness to my cover Granny is uncanny. Though she left this earth when I was six years old, I recently feel her presence in my writing with the strange coincidence of her clone on my cover. I remember her gentleness and her love. Thank you for the inspiration, Grandma.
CHAPTER ONE
Franklin put his right hand out and took Granny’s left hand in his. He gazed into Granny’s eyes as he moved closer. Granny leaned her head toward Franklin––waiting. Franklin leaned forward and ever so gently pulled Granny into his arms, just enough, so he could reach her lips. At that moment, Granny felt a rough tongue on her face.
She swatted the tongue away, trying to meld back into her dream of the kiss, after the moment when Franklin and she had said, “I do.” The tongue was back. Granny opened one eye, slowly coming out of her dream, turned her head slightly, and looked straight into the face of Mrs. Bleaty, her pet goat.
After pushing Mrs. Bleaty away with a small tap on the nose, Granny wiped her face and tried to turn over on the bed, but her body wouldn’t move. She felt a heavy load pressing the bottom part of her body, as if her legs were weighted down.
Granny again tried to move. Had she had a stroke during the night? Should she call 911? Granny opened both eyes and looked down to the end of her body. No, it was not a stroke; it was the shysters! Her pets Baskerville, Fish, Little White Poodle, Furball and Tank were plastered to her body and sleeping soundly.
Granny wondered why they were still here. Usually, the shysters and Baskerville hightailed it out of the house in the evening to make their nightly rounds of the town, ending up at Franklin Gatsby’s house to get some sleep before they retraced their steps and made it back to Granny’s, later in the afternoon.
Granny sat up on her elbows contemplating how to wake up the menagerie of snorers. “Wake up!” Baskerville opened one eye and looked at Granny in somewhat the same way that Granny opened her eyes in the morning. He then closed the one eye and went back to his snoring. Granny looked at Mrs. Bleaty, who was still trying to lick Granny’s face. “Enough! My wrinkles are staying no matter how much you try and lick them off.”
At that moment, the doorbell rang. Baskerville and the shysters jumped when they heard the ring. Granny had recently gotten a new doorbell that played music, and the doorbell was chiming the words to the song, Go Granny, Go Granny, Go Granny, Go. Granny pulled on a sedate robe and her flip-flops.
As Granny shuffled down the hallway, she concluded it was a strange morning, and it wasn’t even 8:00 a.m. She had better call Franklin and let him know that the shysters hadn’t left her house last night. That was a mystery she would have to figure out.
“All right, already,” Granny shouted as the doorbell kept chiming. Her early morning visitor was very impatient.
She glanced at the shysters and Mrs. Bleaty all lined up by the door instead of heading outside to check out the visitor through Baskerville’s pet door. What is up with that? Granny wondered.
She moved to the door and felt the cold hitting her feet, left exposed by her flip-flops. She hadn’t even had time to check her toes to see if they were red or blue. She surmised they would be blue anyway since it was winter.
“All right, all right,” Granny said again as she unlocked the door and opened it. The wind grabbed the door as she pulled it open and a big gust blew into the house, catching her tiny frame and knocking her backward. The only thing that kept her from falling over from the force of the door and the wind was Baskerville and Mrs. Bleaty, who anticipated what was going to happen and braced themselves against her.
A bundled up older gentleman, holding a snow shovel as a cane, hustled into the room. “’Bout time you opened that door, Granny.” The man’s speech was crackled and crotchety.
“What do you want, Silas?” Granny barked at the man.
“I have to go downtown. No one can drive in this blizzard.”
Granny turned and lifted the shade on her living room window. The snowflakes were flying by and she couldn’t see Mavis’s house across the street. That must be why the shysters were still at home. Fuchsia was having a raging blizzard. That explained the color of her toes too.
“So why are you here?” Granny asked testily.
“I told you; I need to go downtown,” the crotchety older man barked as he moved towards Granny’s stairs to the basement.
Granny quickly put herself between the man and the basement stairs. “Explain yourself! Where are you going? Baskerville, Fish, Little White Poodle, Furball, Tank, attack!” Granny instructed as she pointed to the older man.
The older man reached into the pockets of his winter coat and brought out some bacon and sardines, and tossed them into the bowls on the floor. He crossed his arms and gave Granny a challenging look as the animals ignored Granny’s command and slurped up the treats in the bowls.
Granny stomped her feet, planting them solidly on the floor. “Again I ask, what are you doing here?”
“Move it, Granny,” the man said gruffly as he moved toward the steps. “I need to go downtown and my house doesn’t have access to the underground streets of Fuchsia. Yours does. See you later.” Silas Crickett moved forward, grabbed Granny in a bear hug, gave her a quick kiss on the cheek as he lifted her tiny petite frame out of the way and proceeded down the steps with Granny following behind, and out the fireplace door into the room that led to the underground streets of Fuchsia.
Granny slammed the fireplace door shut behind her neighbor Silas, and with a little wicked grin on her face, she walked into the room behind the fireplace that led to the streets. With a chuckle, she turned the lock. Walking back into her family room, she shut the fireplace door, reached into the inside regions of the fireplace and again turned the hidden lock on the fireplace door. That should fix him from coming back this way, Granny thought.
Granny got back upstairs just in time to hear her cell phone ringing the Dragnet theme, signaling that Franklin was calling. The menagerie of animals scattered as Granny flip-flopped back to her bedroom. “What?” she barked into her cellphone.
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“Have you seen the shysters? When I woke up they weren’t here.” Franklin asked in a worried tone.
“Have you looked out your window? No one in their right mind would go out this morning, even our animals.”
“Sounding a little smug this morning aren’t you, Hermiony?”
“With you, Franklin, always,” Granny chirped back.
Franklin and Granny were engaged, and were to be married the day after Christmas. Franklin had moved to Fuchsia to get away from the big city. After being a New York City detective, retiring in a small town had seemed the perfect fit for him. Unfortunately, he hadn’t counted on the fact that small towns have their share of crime too. He hadn’t counted on meeting Granny, who seemed to always land herself in the middle of the trouble. He hadn’t counted on her unusual spark, driving him to fall crazy in love with her.
“I need a new weapon, Franklin.”
“Ah, Granny, I thought we agreed that now that your son, Thor, is the new lead detective and chief of police for the Fuchsia Police Department, he retired you from your undercover work with the merchants. Of course, maybe you don’t remember.”
“I do remember. But I need a weapon against my new neighbor who moved into Sally’s house. He attacked me this morning.” Granny sputtered.
Franklin, familiar with Granny’s sometimes over exaggerated truths, sighed. “Ok, what happened?”
“I’ll explain it to you as soon as you come and take me downtown,” Granny cajoled.
“No, we are not going downtown in this blizzard. Are you forgetting your car is stored at my house since we haven’t rebuilt your garage after the fire?”
Franklin was referring to the garage next to Granny’s house that had been destroyed by an arson fire earlier in the year, along with her treasured cars. Franklin had given Granny a new, restored, ‘57 Chevy Red Corvette convertible to replace her old one on the day he had proposed to her.
Granny lifted the phone to her face and gave it a dirty look. She pressed the EyeTime button and Franklin’s face appeared on her screen. Granny looked straight into Franklin’s eyes through EyeTime and said, “And who are you?” With a cackle, Granny pressed disconnect and looked down at Mrs. Bleaty who had come into the bedroom and was now trying to eat Granny’s cellphone.
“It’s time for all of you to brave the storm,” Granny said to Mrs. Bleaty as she grabbed her collar.
Granny pulled Mrs. Bleaty down the hall by the collar while instructing Little White Poodle, Tank, and Baskerville that it was time to go out. Fish and Furball could stay put since they had indoor litter boxes that they used when the weather was bad.
Once again, when Granny opened the door, the wind blew her backward, and the snow hit her in the face. She quickly shut the door and leaned her 100-pound body against it to get it shut. “Ok, I get it. I guess when ya gotta go, you’ll go; but remember it has to be outside.”
Granny, whose real name was Hermiony Vidalia Criony Fiddlestadt, sat down on the cold floor next to her warm furry creatures. She hugged Baskerville, a big hound dog, whom she had acquired after she had put his owner in the hoosegow. As she was hugging Baskerville, the rest of her furry friends attacked her with love, licking her face and purring loudly. Fish, a part Siamese cat, was a pet store dropout, and Little White Poodle, whose owner also got put in the hoosegow, were hers. Tank, a dog built like his name, and Furball, a cat that resembled her name because she was puffy and looked like a large ball, belonged to Franklin, but had adopted Granny. “All right, all right, I can’t help it if you are all wimps.” Granny laughed as she moved them off of her and stood up. What was she going to do today since there was a blizzard outside?
Granny took another peek outside through her living room curtains and proceeded back to her bedroom. Once there, she opened her closet door and pulled out some jeans and a bright red sweatshirt. Since she was no longer undercover, she could ditch her undercover Granny clothes, such as the hose she wore on her legs and her polyester skirts. The jig was up, so it was time for a new wardrobe. The sweatshirt and jeans weren’t exactly what she had in mind but she hadn’t found the right look for her new social status. She was an engaged woman, after all, so she had to look spiffy now.
Granny pulled on her newest purple sparkly snow boots, grabbed her winter coat and purple earmuffs before bidding farewell to the shysters, and made sure their pet doors were not frozen shut before she left. At least the doors were not blocked by the blowing snow. It seemed to accumulate farther down the porch away from the door.
Making sure she had the key to her door to the underground streets so she could get back in, she made her way to the basement, out the fireplace door, and through the room and through the underground streets, locking the door behind her.
CHAPTER TWO
Granny dropped the key in her pocket since she had left her pocketbook home this time. Today she had no umbrella, nor her large knitting needle disguised as a cane. Her last solved crime had also ended her sneaky, undercover, decrepit Granny routine. Although she was old, no one actually knew her age––she wasn’t as slow and disabled as she had led people to believe. Granny sighed a big sigh. Now that she was no longer working undercover for the Fuchsia merchants, she wondered what she was going to do with her life. It was certainly going to be boring if her kids or Franklin had anything to say about it.
As Granny walked the underground downtown, she noticed the changes that were taking place since the City Council had decided to open the previously unknown streets and make it easier to shop in Fuchsia in the winter. Properties of Fuchsia homes were inspected by the Fuchsia Property Inspector. Granny liked to call him Specky because he was always inspecting something. Specky had examined the basements of the property owners along the underground streets, and had found places in the walls that had never been opened up to give the homeowner access to the underground area. It was then left to the homeowners themselves to decide if they wanted to open their doors to the new avenues of underground Fuchsia. Amazingly, they all did, and as Granny walked by the doors, there were Christmas wreaths and bright rugs accenting all of the underground entrances to the homes––the same as you would see on a normal street above ground.
Granny still felt strange walking down a street without a prop––like her umbrella or knitting needle. Luckily, her children no longer wanted to put her in the wrinkle farm, even though she was still a little forgetful from time to time. They must have realized that her forgetfulness occurred because she was always on the move, her mind always focused on catching the next crook––although now that job seemed to be over, and the forgetfulness was just part of her undercover persona. Thor was probably right. It was time for her to behave herself, especially now that Thor was marrying Heather, and Heather’s daughter Angel was going to be her granddaughter. Granny knew she had set a good example for her other grandchildren when they were growing up. Her daughter Penelope had never complained––until recently––about Granny’s behavior. Granny had always done the right thing with her grandchildren, even if she hadn’t let the real Hermiony Vidalia Criony Fiddlestadt out until she was sure her kids were grown up in the way they should go, and her grandchildren too. But now, she had Angel to think of.
Granny walked slowly, thinking about the changes in her life the last few months and the changes in the Fuchsia underground. As she neared the lift that Graves’ Funeral Home used to transport caskets underground to the Fuchsia Cemetery, she stopped. Maybe her friend Delight and some Boneyard Coffee would cheer her up. Delight was now working in her new coffee and teapot-shaped building that she had renamed The Pink Percolator. Unfortunately, it didn’t have access to the underground streets. The city of Fuchsia was working on expanding the underground streets, but it being winter and all, and with the ground being frozen, the project would have to wait until next summer. How was she going to get to the former Ella’s Enchanted Forest––now the Pink Percolator––without having to walk knee-, and sometimes, waist-deep in this Minnesota blizzard
?
Granny shrugged her shoulders and moved toward the lift into Graves’s mortuary. Previously, the now Graves’ Mortuary building had been Ella’s Enchanted Forest, but the City of Fuchsia thought it would be better to relocate the mortuary so it would be more comfortable for mourners to travel, and easier for the funeral home to transport caskets in the comfort of the underground streets from the mausoleum and out to the cemetery.
Since taking over the building, Graves’ Mortuary had put a code on the lift, so that every Tom, Dick and Harry couldn’t get into the funeral home. Granny supposed she could go to one of the other underground entrances to the downtown Fuchsia stores, but Graves’ was closer to Delight’s new coffee house. Because she was the one who had found the underground streets and had hooked the crooks working here with one hook of her umbrella, she was given the code for Graves’ lift. Of course, getting the lift code might also have had something to do with the fact that she had caught Mr. Graves doing a little snookering with Ivy from over at the Ringlet and Curl Hair Salon when Mr. Graves was supposed to be having his mustache dyed. Granny had a “code no-tell-promise” with him. He gave her the code, and she promised not to tell.
Granny jumped on the lift and punched in the code so the lift would unlock and rise into the mortuary.
At the sound of the lift being activated, Mr. Graves, who was upstairs, turned from arranging the flowers in the former forest room that had been Ella’s, to welcoming Granny. He knew it had to be her because no one else had the code.
“Granny, what you are doing out in the middle of a blizzard?” he asked, as he took her hand to help her off the lift.
“That new neighbor of mine, pesky Silas Crickett––don’t know why his mother didn’t name him Jiminy––rudely woke me up and thought he should use my access to the underground streets. I was up so I decided I should go see Delight at her new shop.”
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