Pains and Penalties: (A Geeks and Things Cozy Mystery Novella #1) (Geeks and Things Cozy Mysteries)

by Sarah Biglow

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Monday morning came as a shock to the system for Kalina. She’d gone straight home after her stop off at the fairgrounds. She hadn’t heard anything else from Chris but she wasn’t expecting to. At ten minutes to nine, she flipped the front door sign to “OPEN” and settled behind the counter, ready for an influx of teenagers and older patrons. After all, she had a host of new arrivals waiting to be distributed. She’d given AJ the day off from helping out, given everything he had gone through. He seemed grateful to just be a kid for a little while. He had plenty of time to grow up. The stillness of the shop wrapped itself around her, seeping into her thoughts, and calmed her.

  The bell sounded above the front door and jarred her out of her trance. Chris stood in the doorway, framed by morning light. He was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. He looked exhausted. Kalina stood up and approached him.

  “Hi.”

  “Uh, hey. I hope this isn’t a bad time.”

  She made a show of looking around the shop. “Perfect time. How are you?”

  “Honestly, I’m still trying to process everything. Dan, he wrote out a confession yesterday. He’s meeting with the prosecutor to discuss a plea. Avoid trial. He’s going to do time and a lot of it.”

  “I know you looked up to him.”

  “I thought he was a good guy. Good police officer. I guess I never realized just how much darkness he was carrying around with him. I can’t imagine going through what he went through. And it kills me that I even feel sorry for him.”

  “Vigilante justice isn’t right but sometimes the system is broken and making things right gets messy.” She motioned to the stacks of comics. “Isn’t that what most of these are about?”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “Has there been any word on Mrs. Grant?”

  “It sounds like they got her stabilized. She’s going to make it but they said she’s probably going to have some nerve damage from the arsenic.”

  “How awful.”

  “I was going to head over and let her know that we caught Dan. Would you like to come with me?”

  “Are you sure that’s appropriate?”

  “If it wasn’t for you, Kal, she’d probably be dead and the case would still be open. I couldn’t have done this without you.”

  “If you can wait a few hours I’ll close up for lunch and we can go over.”

  “Yeah, of course. I don’t know why I expected you to just drop everything. You have a business to run.”

  “I’ll see you over at the hospital at noon, okay?”

  He didn’t say anything, just pulled her into a tight hug. She held on tight too. She hadn’t been imagining the way they were falling back into each other’s orbits. Maybe there was something there to rekindle.

  She let that thought buoy her through the morning. By noon she was ready to get out of the shop. She hung up the lunch sign and locked the front door. Chris waited for her just outside the shop. The hospital was at the other end of town from the waterfront. It afforded easier access in case of accidents on the highway. They checked in at the front desk and were escorted to the ICU. Mrs. Grant lay in bed, her skin ashen and her eyes half-closed. But she was most definitely alive.

  “Mrs. Grant? It’s Kalina Greystone. I wanted to see how you were doing,” Kalina said and took a seat at the woman’s bedside.

  Mrs. Grant roused herself and turned to face her. “You told him, didn’t you?”

  “I had to. But we know you didn’t do anything to Cynthia or Agatha. We caught the person responsible. He’s going to jail for a very long time.”

  “Who?” She coughed. “Who was it?”

  “Daniel Cahill. He was Samuel Gordon’s son.”

  Silent tears streamed down Mrs. Grant’s sunken cheeks. “I should have known.” She looked directly at Chris. “We were going to come forward and admit what we did. We talked about it. I’m sorry I wasn’t truthful with you before.”

  “Do you know who really killed Alice Beech?”

  Mrs. Grant’s eyes suddenly shown with tears. “Yes. There was a car speeding away that night and we did see his face. But it wasn’t Samuel Gordon. It was the Police Captain’s son, Andrew Paxton. The officers on the scene knew it , too, but I guess Sam had been pulled over for speeding that night and they just decided to make him the scapegoat. I’m assuming it was Captain Paxton’s orders. Alan was good friends with him and agreed to take the case to keep Andrew out of jail.” Tears trickled down her pale cheeks.

  “Why did you lie?” Chris asked from the foot of the bed.

  “The captain threatened us. At first, anyway. Then he tried to bribe us. In the end Alan convinced me that we were well liked enough in town to be believable. It was the biggest regret of my life.”

  “Did you marry him to keep the secret?”

  “He’d already proposed. After a while it just sort of faded into the past.”

  Chris just nodded. “Good luck with your recovery, Mrs. Grant.”

  The admission about coming forward seemed to tire Mrs. Grant out and Kalina and Chris soon left her to rest. As they wound their way back to the front of the hospital, neither of them spoke.

  “Are you going to charge her with perjury?”

  “I think she’s been through enough hell. She’s going to be living with a permanent reminder of what she did and what it cost her. That’s enough.”

  “That’s really kind of you.”

  “I wouldn’t call it that. But I don’t see the point in putting an old woman behind bars at this point.” He pulled out his phone. “I am going to have Andrew Paxton and his father arrested. Alice Beech is going to get the justice she deserved.”

  “I’m glad Sam’s death won’t have been for nothing.” She checked her phone. “Hey, I’m still on lunch for another half hour. You want to come back and finish that game of Zombie Dice?”

  “You’re on.”

  They lazily made their way back to the shop, sequestered themselves in the back room with lunch and started the game over. Kalina even let him go first. As the dice clattered around the table in a bid to escape, a sense of normalcy settled over the shop and its two inhabitants. While darkness and death had touched the town, it would soon be pushed to the back of the townspeople’s collective memory. Ellesworth would resume being a nice, waterfront, Massachusetts town. There was little chance Kalina would get wrapped up in another case of wrongful convictions and vigilante justice. She was just a comic book shop owner, after all.

  Read an Excerpt from FORGIVE AND FORGET (Geeks and Things #2)

  An unusually oppressive early morning summer heat shimmered on the pavement as Kalina Greystone took off at a steady jog from the front of her shop, Geeks and Things. She had barely taken enough steps to get to the next block on Main Street when her phone beeped at her, displaying the temperature: 81 degrees. At seven in the morning.

  "Wonderful," she groaned before settling on a playlist and picking up the pace. Heat or no heat, she needed to get her run in before she had to open up for the day.

  The end of summer was a big money maker for the shop, especially with kids getting ready for school. There was little doubt in her mind that most of the teenagers in town would be turning in summer reading lists crammed with comics and graphic novels. She only felt a little guilty that the next generation wasn't reading actual books.

  The notion that this was her shop, her livelihood, had finally settled in. People in town had stopped comparing the way she ran the business to her father—at least to her face—and it made the decision to come back home to Ellesworth feel like the right call. The little seaside town moved at a slower pace to the city, where she'd spent most of her adult life, but it had some perks, too. She'd managed to reconnect and rekindle a spark with her high school sweetheart, Christian Harper.

  Kalina took a sharp left and sucked in a deep breath as she took the hill leading in the direction of the cemetery and the town's one church. As her heart pounded in her ears from the exert
ion, she flashed back to three months ago when she and Chris had stood in the cemetery and solved a pair of murders. The frenzy surrounding Mrs. Davies and Ms. Ellicott's passing had finally died down and the town was back to being quaint and normal. Kalina's phone buzzed in her pocket and she pulled it out to see a text from Chris asking her if they were still on for dinner. She smiled and slowed to a walk before responding that they were definitely on for dinner. They were lucky that their first break-up had been amicable. They were on different life tracks and they had been mature enough to get that. When he held her hand or kissed her goodnight she still felt like a giddy schoolgirl. Of course, she'd dated in college and grad school but being with Chris now was different. They were finally in a place where they could be together as adults and make it work.

  Phone stowed back in her pocket, Kalina took off at a sprint to make it up and over the hill and settle back into a comfortable pace. As she ran she spotted Theo Maxwell in his boxers and undershirt scooping up the morning paper. He blushed bright red and waved before darting back inside. She chuckled to herself and took the next right, heading past the church. The door eased open and a lone figure stepped out looking subdued and tired. Leslie Mayfair, the former almost-Mrs. Cahill. A pang of sadness tightened Kalina’s chest as she watched the usually bubbly school teacher hunch her shoulders on her way to her car. She hadn’t known her fiancé had been killing little old ladies for sending his innocent father to prison. They made eye contact for a brief, uncomfortable moment and Kalina opened her mouth to say ‘Good morning’ but held her tongue. Leslie yanked her car door open and climbed into the driver seat.

  Kalina waited until the car was out of sight before continuing her morning circuit. Sweat glistened on her bare arms and matted her short, auburn curls to her forehead as she veered away from the church and out towards the coast. Only a handful of people lived out by the water these days thanks to beach erosion. The salty air was a few degrees cooler and she sucked in a big gulp. Trying to shake the unease from seeing Leslie, Kalina put on another burst of speed and took the rolling slope of Ocean Front Lane at a decent clip. Her phone vibrated again and, in her earbuds, an automated voice announced that AJ was calling.

  “Answer call,” she said and slowed to a walk. “Hey, AJ, what are you doing up this early?”

  “Hey, Aunt K. I was just checking in. I wanted to see if you needed help at the store today,” her nephew answered.

  He had done a lot of ‘checking in’ in the last couple months. Not that she minded. It put her mind at ease that he was doing okay after watching Mrs. Davies die. “If you want to stop by this afternoon you can. I don’t know that I’ll have too much for you to do, though.”

  “Great. Are you okay?”

  Kalina continued along Ocean Front at a slow pace, getting her heart rate back down to normal. “Yeah, I’m just out for a run.”

  “Oh. You’ve been doing that a lot since…”

  He didn’t have to finish the thought for her know what he meant. “We all cope in different ways. And I could use the exercise.”

  Kalina rounded a bend in the street and a three-story house came into view. It belonged to the Larrabees. She’d been friends with their daughter, Nadine, in high school. Normally it wouldn’t have drawn her attention in the cookie-cutter section of town. Today, she stopped and stood with her mouth hanging open. A man’s body lay prone in the middle of the house’s small driveway and a woman about Kalina’s age sat on the front steps, rocking back and forth.

  “Aunt K., are you there?” AJ’s voice sounded tinny in her earbuds.

  “I have to call you back,” she said and yanked the buds from her ears. She moved into view slowly so as not to startle the woman. “Nadine?”

  The woman looked up and Kalina saw her eyes shine with fresh tears. At this distance she could see Nadine’s hands covered in what Kalina assumed was blood. A dark stain had spread under the man’s head on the asphalt. “Oh, God. What did I do?” Nadine whimpered.

  Kalina pulled the cord out of the headphone jack of her phone and dialed 911. She waited for the operator to give the standard response before speaking. “I need an ambulance at 1609 Ocean Front Lane. Send the police, too. A man is dead.”

  Coming April 2016

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  About The Author

  Sarah lives in Massachusetts with her fiancé. She is a licensed attorney and spends her days combatting employment discrimination as an Investigator with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination.

  She is a self-professed TV junkie and in her spare time (what’s that?), she runs a TV recap blog with her best friend (and sorority sister), Jen.

  You can connect with Sarah on Twitter @SBiglowWrites or by joining her newsletter on www.sarah-biglow.com

  For those TV-obsessed souls, you can head on over to the recap blog: www.more-tv-please.com. You can also follow the blog on Twitter @MoreTVPlease and check it out on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MoreTVPlease.