Murder, Malice and Mischief

by Quinn, Lucy

  "Hey," I said to Ridge, and pulled him into a hug.

  "Hey to you." He motioned with his chin. "Where do you want me?"

  There were several answers that came to mind. None of them appropriate here. None of them I was sure we were ready for. "I could use some brawn in the storeroom. Jack's managing it single-handedly right now."

  "You got it."

  We broke our embrace before it became obvious we were holding on too long. He took a step toward the storeroom.

  "Ridge."

  He paused.

  "Thanks for coming. You know I really do love you? There's no way I could live without one of my two best friends in the world."

  "I know," he said. "Back at you." He leaned over and whispered in my ear, "Relax, Jamers. I know that was the happy drugs, as you called them, talking." He kissed my cheek and headed for the storeroom.

  But was it, Ridge?

  I looked out at the happy, busy group in front of me.

  You make my heart smile. Each and every one of you.

  NEXT UP: Jamie’s excited to be working with her good friend and master penman, Ralph Coggins. When Ralph turns up dead, it’s up to Jamie to find his killer.

  Get IN THE NIB OF TIME. Book 2 of the Hand Lettering Mystery series.

  About the Author

  Daisy Robyns is the mystery pen name of romance author Gina Robinson. As Daisy, she writes sweet, funny, warm-hearted cozy mysteries. Her characters are witty, adventurous, and crafty in the nicest way.

  Daisy loves playing small town sleuth and transporting readers to a world where wine pairs with hand lettering, there's a hint of romance, and justice always prevails.

  If you want to know when Daisy’s next book will be available, visit her website, www.daisyrobyns.com where you can sign up for her newsletter.

  www.daisyrobyns.com

  A Murder at the Country Club - Jessa Archer

  Copyright

  Copyright 2019 by Malachite Publishing LLC

  All Rights Reserved

  Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s wild and naughty imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or other, without permission from the author or publisher.

  1st Edition: September, 2019

  About This Book

  A Murder at the Country Club

  A Canterbury Golf Club Mystery

  By:

  JESSA ARCHER

  On the night of the Canterbury Golf Club’s First Annual Glow-ball Golf Tournament, Lady Captain Beatrice Yates argues with Rudolph “Ruddy” Agani in front of all the members and specially invited guests because Ruddy can’t get along with anyone. When he is found murdered on the club’s seventeenth hole soon after, Beatrice becomes the prime suspect.

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  Chapter 1

  RUDOLPH “Ruddy” Agani was murdered on the green of the Canterbury Golf Club’s seventeenth hole during the First Annual Nighttime Glow-Ball Golf Tournament, but no one saw who killed him.

  Everyone saw Ruddy leave the party in the clubhouse two hours before, of course.

  No one could have missed it.

  Not the members, not the guests we were trying to impress, and not the local newspaper photographer.

  Every eye in the clubhouse swiveled and watched Ruddy stomp out, muttering and bobbling his close-cropped head in anger, right after they had seen me give him a stern dressing down.

  Later, as four of us stood over Ruddy’s dead body in the dark, shining the flashlights from our cell phones at the wine-dark stain on the shaved grass while the corpse’s motionless hand reached for the flagpole that whipped in the breeze, everyone turned and looked at me.

  I was as shocked as everyone else that someone had killed Ruddy, though.

  No one expects a murder at a country club.

  Chapter 2

  THE First Annual Nighttime Glow-Ball Golf Tournament was held at the Canterbury Golf Club in early May.

  Though May should have been late spring in New England, the golfers wore thick undershirts, pullovers, and sturdy, woolen socks for the social outing. The breeze blew stiffly, pulling at everyone’s clothes, and the chill felt more like March that evening.

  Despite the chilly weather, we had played three holes of golf in the pitch-black dark with glowing balls that had striped like meteors down the dark fairways and putted them into the glowing holes on the greens. Lighted poles had marked the edges of the fairways so people didn’t get lost out there. The course had a good number of trees that were tall hulks in the deep night.

  The brisk air and walk in the dark had been amusing and exhilarating, and our foursome had shot a respectable fifty-two among us. The leaderboard charts hanging on the wall in the clubhouse showed that other groups had done better and so would win.

  The point of the outing was not to win.

  At least, it wasn’t for me.

  As the golfers came in from playing their three-hole rounds in the dark, the clubhouse became packed with people sipping drinks and eating hors d’oeuvres off tiny, china plates.

  Laughter, talking, and classic rock music filled the clubhouse, and the members and guests seemed to be having a good time as I shimmied between crowded groups, chatting and sizing up the crowd.

  The clubhouse was packed full of members and guests.

  Members had been required to bring guests to this festive outing.

  Yes, required.

  The members and guests had arrived earlier in the evening for supper before the glow-ball tournament, while the sun had still lingered above the horizon and they could enjoy the spectacular golf course panorama beyond the clubhouse’s windows.

  On the golf course, the trees were mostly leafed out after the long winter that year, and the grass was thick and manicured to show our club off at its best advantage to the guests. Indeed, the fairways had been spotless without a downed leaf nor a blade of grass out of place. The rough had been cut to a length that seemed proper but not punitive, and the sand traps were raked in pleasing patterns.

  We needed those guests to admire the Canterbury Golf Club.

  We needed them to join the Canterbury Golf Club.

  The Canterbury Golf Club needed new members desperately. The rival golf club only ten miles away and one town over, the Greens of Grass Country Club, had poached five dozen of our members during the winter months with a no-initiation-fee special and reduced dues for two years. The Canterbury Ways and Means Committee had had a nasty surprise when the members’ spring dues did not roll in this year.

  Suddenly, Canterbury’s bank accounts weren’t quite so flush with cash as they had been in decades past, but the bills still arrived daily.

  The club’s recent insolvency was a closely held secret among the people who managed the club, like myself. I am Beatrice Yates, and I have been the Lady Captain for five years, which meant I knew a great deal about the club that the regular rank-and-file members did not.

  For example, I knew that the greenskeeper, Bhagwan Das, overwatered the greens, and the club’s monthly water bill was astronomical.

  I knew that certain club members must be padding their handicaps, a practice called sandbagging, which is a deplorable method of cheating at golf. My eighty-three-year-old uncle, Arnie Holmes, was certainly one of them, and sandbagging was not the only way he massaged his scores. Luckily, Uncle Arnie over-tipped the waitstaff and tended to buy lunches and bar rounds for his friends and others, so no one had murdered him yet.

  And I knew that if at least forty-three new members were not admitted into the Canterbury Golf Club by the end of the fall, the golf club would be
forced to close and sell the golf course, clubhouse, and sundry bits to the local town of Canterbury for far less than they were worth, due to a clause in the initial purchase contract, seven decades earlier.

  The town would turn this gracious track into a muni.

  If that happened, this private, modestly priced golf club wouldn’t be the same, and yet one more piece of my much-loved and very-missed husband would be gone.

  So, I didn’t want that to happen.

  As Lady Captain, I was in somewhat of a position to help save the club.

  Thus, I was throwing golfing soirees and outings and lunches and trying to lure prospective members into joining up. We needed only a few dozen people, and Canterbury was a very nice course and club. I thought of my tasks as spreading the joy of golf.

  The evening of the glow-ball tournament was proceeding brilliantly, and my fellow board members and staff had whispered to me that twenty people had inquired about membership that evening.

  Not that I was counting them on my fingers and toes or anything.

  The happy babble of the crowd with occasional surges of laughter rolled through the clubhouse. Glasses clinked. Heads of brown, black, auburn, blond, silver, and salted pepper leaned toward each other in conversation.

  The ladies’ golf pro, Sherlynne Orman, stood at the front of the room, carefully inking scores on the leaderboard in calligraphic numbers as foursomes came in from the course. One of our hostesses, Melanie, was reading the scores to her from cards while members and guests clustered around them, cheering as each number went up.

  Over on the other side of the room, trouble brewed.

  I could sense the disturbance in the room even before the grumble of angry voices reached me.

  As a thirty-year veteran of kindergarten classrooms, I had sixth, seventh, and eighth senses for when things were going wrong and about to devolve into a slap fight.

  The back corner of the room rippled with angry tones that were rising over the conversation, and the people around the two men who were involved in the disagreement were growing silent and shuffling away in concern.

  I leaped through the crowd, parting the humans and dodging tables and juice boxes—er, cocktails—to reach the two grown men who were arguing in the corner.

  The crowd tightened as people were backing away from Rudolph “Ruddy” Agani and Oliver Shwetz.

  Ruddy’s face was once again flushed in anger, color rising in his cheeks and nose. Despite the fact that Ruddy’s given name was Rudolph, people assumed that his nickname was a reference to the way his face reddened whenever he was angry, which was often. Ruddy’s fists clenched at his sides near the seams of his pants, and he was leaning forward as if to force his sneer toward Oliver.

  Oliver Shwetz, however, was leaning back with his arms tightly crossed over his chest and his eyebrows pinched in anger. He scowled, and his gaze flicked from Ruddy, who seemed about to attack, to the crowd staring at them. Oliver was shaking his head, his lips pursed together as if he was not going to say one more word.

  As Oliver denied whatever Ruddy was accusing him of, Ruddy’s hound-like face reddened more. Though he was perhaps in his mid-fifties, brown streaked the whites of his eyes like a morose man of nine decades or a person prone to rages so intense that anger had broken blood vessels in his eyes.

  Everyone who had dealt with Ruddy knew which one he was.

  I reached the two men and raised my hands. Years of being the sole adult in a room full of five-year-olds served me well. “Gentlemen,” I announced, “may I see you in my office, please?”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Ruddy hissed the last word. “Oliver was just apologizing, and I was leaving. I need to talk to someone.”

  And then Ruddy stomped to the double doors, flung one open and let it bang the wall, and stormed out of the clubhouse, nearly bowling over three golfers coming in from the dark course.

  Chapter 3

  EVERYONE watched Ruddy Agani leave the clubhouse and march into the darkness.

  One of the people coming in through the double doors, Pauline Damir, stumbled as Ruddy shoved her out of his way, and she dropped her green, glowing golf ball. It rolled away on the carpeting.

  A chain of club members passed it back to her. People patted her shoulders, checking on her, but she insisted she was fine even though she glared outside the wide windows with a truly angry expression. “That Ruddy Agani is a jerk,” Pauline was heard to mutter to the woman who held her elbow with concern. “I could just strangle him.”

  Her husband, Tom, pushed through the crowd to make sure she was all right.

  The members and guests that filled the clubhouse swiveled and watched Ruddy flounce out, including the reporter from the Canterbury Tales, the local town newspaper, who raised her camera and snapped a picture of Ruddy’s back as he marched out the back doors, snarling at people who then immediately backed away from him.

  White light flashed over the crowd.

  The reporter, Lale Kollen, lowered her camera. “Well, that was exciting. Does that happen often at the Canterbury Country Club?”

  “Golf club, Canterbury Golf Club, though we have tennis courts and a pool, too,” I corrected her absently as I stepped forward to check on Oliver. Getting the name right in the newspaper article was important for our publicity efforts. “No, of course, it doesn’t. Oliver, are you all right?”

  Oliver Shwetz seemed to shake himself like he was flicking the anger off of his shoulders. “I’m fine. Thank you, Beatrice, but I’m fine. I’ll drown my sorrows in the shrimp and cocktail sauce.”

  With no more opportunity to watch a fight, the crowd collectively turned their backs and resumed chatting. Even Lale, the newspaper reporter, wandered away to take pictures of the way the candlelight was glinting on the crystal punch bowl.

  Hopefully, Lale would take pictures of all the happy people doing fun things, I mused. We didn’t want the one little scuffle to be the focus of the article about the Canterbury Golf Club.

  I turned back to Oliver. “Are you sure you don’t want to decompress in my office for a bit?”

  Oliver Shwetz sighed. “Maybe that’s a good idea. My cardiologist said that stress is going to give me a heart attack someday, if this doesn’t do it first.” He patted his round belly. “He says I should quit my law firm, too.”

  Oliver had been Canterbury’s general-practice attorney for decades. Whether you needed to sue an insurance company over a fender-bender, sell your house, or write your will, he was the lawyer for the job. He also gave discounts to club members. I told him, “Well, I have enjoyed getting out more since I retired. More time for golf.”

  His smile was a little wan, and he leaned in as he frowned. “Maybe I should retire. Maybe it is getting to be too much for me. I’m making stupid mistakes.”

  I patted him on the shoulder. “I’m sure it’s nothing, Oliver. You know where my office is, upstairs. Go do some meditating and lower that blood pressure a bit. Take deep breaths and think about golf.”

  Oliver perked up a little. “I had a good round this morning.”

  “Yes, muse on that.”

  He left me standing in the crowd, and I bustled off to find my uncle Arnie Holmes and talk to him about how the night was going. He’d been several groups behind Pauline Damir and her foursome, so he should have been finishing his three holes of glow-ball golf soon. I just had to wait for him to come into the clubhouse.

  If anyone knew all the gossip in the club, my uncle would.

  It took me half an hour to work my way through the crowd, talking to old friends who were members and chatting with the prospectives because we wanted their money.

  One woman wanted to know if some of the appetizers were gluten-free. I had discussed this with Chef Leopold earlier, so I knew what to tell her. “Everything except the meatballs and the teriyaki skewers is gluten-free. The chef is very careful about cross-contamination. Try the cheese mini-soufflés, deviled eggs, cucumber rounds, and veggie platters.”

&n
bsp; Other prospectives wanted to know when the pool would be open. I told them in late June, and then they wanted to know if there were adult-only times because that’s when the kids got out of school. Yes, we had adult swim times.

  Another possible member wanted to discuss the tennis courts. I discussed like a champ. We needed every new member we could get.

  I dodged around the golf club’s trophy case, a glass and steel shelving unit packed with trophies that our teams had brought home from tournaments plus valuable pieces of golf memorabilia, like a crystal golf ball that had once belonged to the great golfer Bobby Jones—but that’s a different story. The case divided the main part of the dining room from a small passage on the edge, mostly used by the wait staff during restaurant hours. We still needed to outfit the trophy case with glass doors and locks to protect the items on the shelves. As I was the club’s Lady Captain, I should probably arrange that. Everything fell under my purview.

  My best friend in the whole world, Trudi von Shike, was standing in a corner alone behind the trophy case, checking something on her phone. Her short, gray hair had swung forward, curtaining the sides of her face, and she looked like a wiry little imp who might spring up and vault to the chandelier to gambol above the crowd.

  Some people go through their whole lives, wondering who would be there for them if anything devastating happened. I knew who my real friends were. In a world of acquaintances, Trudi was real. We’d been friends for more than thirty years, since our college days, and when things had been rough for me, Trudi had been there every day.