Disturbing the Peace (Sunday Cove)

by Webb, Peggy

  Disturbing the Peace

  (Sunday Cove)

  Peggy Webb

  WH

  Westmoreland House

  Disturbing the Peace (Sunday Cove) by Peggy Webb

  Published by Westmoreland House

  Smashwords Edition

  All characters and events in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

  Copyright @2014 by Peggy Webb, author’s cut w/new material

  Cover design 2014 by Vicki Hinze

  Publishing History/Bantam/Loveswept/Copyright © 1987 by Peggy Webb

  This is a work of fiction.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or via any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or via any information storage and retrieval system without the express written permission of the copyright holder and publisher.

  Published in the United States of America by Westmoreland House WH

  Dear Reader,

  Welcome back SUNDAY COVE and more innocent, carefree times. You’ll find the language tame and the bedroom doors closed.

  I hope you fell in love with Holly in NAUGHTY AND NICE and Mary Ann in BIRDS OF A FEATHER. One of the scenes in NAUGHY AND NICE was true. Visit my blog to find out which one! I blog as both Peggy Webb and Elaine Hussey, my literary fiction name, at www.elainehussey.com. Do stop by! I frequently give away wonderful prizes to readers who leave comments.

  The original version of BIRDS OF A FEATHER was considered the first true romantic comedy. It was used by select colleges as an example of how to write comedy. Many years and many books later, I received a Romantic Times Pioneer Award for forging the way for the sub genre of romantic comedy. That was 2008, I believe. Dates tend to escape my mind.

  It’s so much fun to revise these romance classics for you! I’m changing the settings in all eight books to Sunday Cove, a small fictional town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast with its own romantic legend. In addition to the legend, I’ve added new scenes and a new cast of regulars. I’ve also deleted and/or revised scenes and added Clara’s Cookbook as a bonus in the back of all the books. The recipes are gathered from my family of great Southern cooks and will change in each book.

  Have fun as you watch the characters get caught up in the love spell woven by an ancient legend.

  Now curl up with a cup of spicy Mayan hot chocolate (recipe in the back of the second book as well as this one) and enjoy a few belly laughs – I did as I created this author’s edition. When you read the last page, I hope you’re still smiling.

  I plan to have eight books in SUNDAY COVE. The first one was in December of 2014, and the other seven will be released in 2015. Though each story is connected by a romantic legend, a small Southern town by the sea and the lovable regulars who inhabit it, each book stands alone and can be read out of sequence.

  Look for THE NEARNESS OF YOU…April, 2015! As always, I hope you enjoy every one of the stories in SUNDAY COVE. Thank you for reading!

  Peggy

  Prologue

  Tupelo, Mississippi

  May 5, 1986

  With Tim gone, Amy Logan felt like half a person, as if somebody had sawed off her right arm, knocked a hole in her heart, smashed both kneecaps and then said, Now go on about your business without him. She wished the great catch-all they had wiped out all her memories. She wished she could stop thinking of her husband as simply gone somewhere without her, Hawaii maybe, or Tahiti, an exotic faraway place where he’d send a post card that said, Amy, I miss you terribly. I’m coming home.

  She looked at the pile of wires and boar’s head bristles and batteries on the table in her workshop and wondered what in the world she’d been doing before Tim intruded. Had she been inventing a new kind of toothbrush, one that sang while you brushed your teeth? A tiny robot who followed you around, reminding you of appointments and shopping lists? A new kind of kitchen scrub brush?

  “Yahoo! Amy!” The sound of Sylvia Street’s voice brought Amy out of her blue funk. Being around Aunt Syl was as bracing as standing in front of a stiff ocean breeze. She swept into the room in a multi-colored caftan, a tiny woman still beautiful at sixty. Her wig of choice today was a lively color of brunt orange. Just looking at her made Amy smile.

  “You left the front door unlocked again, dear.” Aunt Syl settled into the chaise.

  Amy started to say, I always leave the door unlocked for Tim.

  “It’s a safe neighborhood, Aunt Syl.”

  “But not nearly as safe as where we’re going.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, Aunt Syl. I thought we’d settled that.”

  Over the last year, Aunt Syl regularly issued her gentle you-need-a-change lecture. Now, she pulled a letter out of an enormous straw bag. Aunt Syl , a writer, always carried a purse big enough for a spiral bound notebook, in case my muse gets a bright idea when I’m not expecting her, she’d say.

  “Just listen to this.” Her aunt unfolded the letter and began to read. “You’ve got to come here. There are plenty of men...”

  “Aunt Syl, wait a minute! I’m not looking for another man!”

  “I know, dear, but I am.”

  “Good heavens! Who’s that letter from?”

  “Clara. You remember Clara Sims, dear.”

  “Who could forget her?” If Sylvia Street was an ocean breeze, Clara Sims was a hurricane. Amy had never seen such an energetic woman, nor one quite as opinionated. She and Syl had grown up together in south Georgia, little girls from the wrong side of the tracks who swore they’d achieve their dreams. And they had. Sylvia Street was on the New York Times bestseller list and Clara was owner of a little cafe that had been written up in Southern Living as one of the top ten restaurants in the South.

  “Exactly!” Aunt Syl beamed at her niece, then kept on reading. “I’ve found the perfect place for you and your niece. It’s a lovely old apartment building, Spanish architecture, you know, which just has so much character and speaks so vividly of the history of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.” Aunt Syl looked up from the letter. “You love history, Amy.”

  “Yes, but I don’t want to move into it! I’m perfectly content right here.” She and Tim had built this house. Leaving would be the same as admitting he was really and truly dead.

  Aunt Syl looked pointedly at the jogging shoes Tim had kicked off just inside the door to Amy’s workshop and the sweat shirt he’d stripped off and draped over a straight-backed chair. Still, Amy didn’t feel the least bit guilty. She knew they were gathering dust. She knew he would never breeze through the door, put them on, grab her in a bear hug and waltz her off with the teasing admonition that she was going to turn into one of her robots if she didn’t get some fresh air.

  Ignoring Amy’s latest protest, Aunt Syl went right back to the letter.

  “There is no better place to start over than Sunday Cove. It’s full of magic, you know, from the Legend of Orange Blossoms! I can’t tell you how many women have come to this place and found true love, and all because a Civil War bride cried tears that turned into orange trees in full bloom. Sometimes, when lonely people are finding each other right and left, the smell of orange blossoms is so strong you can taste it in your coffee. Oh, this is just the perfect place for a young widow to get back into the swing of life.”

  Sylvia folded the letter, her eyes sparkling. “The swing of life! Isn’t that a marvelous way to think about the future?”

  “My past is here and so is my future, Aunt Syl. And that’s all I’m saying on the subject.”

  “Eat your ice cream while it’s still on your plate, dear.”

  Sylvia left in a swirl of color as if a rainbow-hued wi
nd had blown her back into the real world. The work shop felt entirely deserted without her.

  “Of course, I’m not moving.” The sound of Amy’s voice echoed in the yawning emptiness.

  That night Amy’s husband came to her.

  “Where have you been?” She sat up in bed and there he was, big as life, standing in the doorway smiling. “I’ve been waiting for you to come back.”

  He gave her a wink and a left-handed salute, his signature when he left on a trip, silent gestures that contained his parting wish.

  I love you. I’ll see you later. Be happy while I’m gone.

  And then he stated to fade.

  “Tim? Come back.”

  She reached for him, but he had already vanished back into the unreachable shadows of her dreams.

  Chapter 1

  Sunday Cove, Mississippi Gulf Coast

  June 7, 1986

  Amy darted around her new apartment in Sunday Cove, blond ponytail flying and freckled nose shining. Anybody seeing her would have said she looked sixteen instead of twenty-six, and not at all like a widow who had finally interpreted her dream as her husband’s blessing on the move.

  “Put Herman’s spare parts anywhere, Aunt Syl,” she said. “I have to take care of this poor little petunia before it languishes away completely.” She grabbed a flower box and dragged it to the window. “Don’t you worry, Christine,” she said to the drooping plant. “We’ll have you back in the sunshine in no time flat.” Using more grit and spunk than muscle, Amy heaved the flower box onto the windowsill and left it teetering there while she rummaged through a toolbox. “Have you seen my hammer, Aunt Syl?”

  Aunt Syl stuck her head out of the closet, where she had been arranging Herman’s spare parts. Her lively brown eyes were half hidden by a bright red wig that had gone askew. “Why don’t you look in the refrigerator, dear? You’re always misplacing things in the refrigerator.” Having given that sage bit of advice, she disappeared once more into the closet.

  Amy spotted her hammer in a sewing basket. “I’ve got to get organized,” she said for the hundredth time that day. Taking the hammer and a handful of nails, she returned to the second-story window, pushed the flower box aside to make room for herself and leaned far out, her head almost upside down as she searched for a place to anchor her planter. “Ah-ha!” Her hammer made an efficient rat-a-tat against the side of the restored Spanish style house as she drove the nails home.

  She’d have to admit that Clara was right about the architecture. It was marvelous. The grand old two-story building had been renovated and divided into eight apartments, four upstairs and four downstairs.

  “I hope this racket doesn’t bother the neighbors,” she said between hammer blows.

  At last satisfied that her nails would hold, she leaned back inside and carefully lowered the flower box out the window. One side of the box caught securely on the nail, but the other side refused to stay put. Amy and the flower box both hung perilously out the window.

  Suddenly she lost her grip on the heavy flower box and it plummeted to the sidewalk.

  “Look out below!” she yelled.

  The dark-haired man on the sidewalk sidestepped in the nick of time, and Amy thanked her lucky stars for his narrow escape. The flower box crashed at his feet, spewing potting soil on his expensive looking leather boots.

  In that split second, time froze, while Amy and her almost-victim created a tableau worthy of a Shakespearean play.

  He glanced up to see which of his enemies was trying to do him in. Instead of an enemy, he saw a freckled sprite who seemed to be suspended from the window by her toes.

  “Is Christine all right?” the sprite asked.

  He looked back down the sidewalk to confirm what he already knew: he was the only person within yelling distance.

  “Christine seems to have vanished,” he said.

  “Christine is my petunia.”

  “You name your flowers?”

  “Not all of them. Just the ones that look like they need a little extra attention to perk them up.”

  The girl was leaning so far out the window he could see the blood was rushing to her face.

  “Careful up there. You’re going to fall.”

  Amy pulled back, but not so far that she couldn’t study the man she had almost squashed. His voice was a deep rumble, pleasant but a little formidable. His eyes were as blue as Mississippi Gulf sparkling in the distance. They were the blue of a hundred watercolor seascapes her husband had painted. She closed her eyes for a moment and images of her Tim Logan crowded her mind—his hair shining golden in the sun, his brown eyes squinted as he studied the changing patterns of sunlight across the water, the intensity of his expression as his brush moved surely across the canvas, his hands slim and gifted and smudged with paint, the stillness of the house after he had gone, the daisies she had planted on the newly turned grave.

  “I won’t think about all that now,” she said to herself.

  “I’m afraid Christine has had an untimely demise.” That deep voice brought Amy out of her reverie. The man was holding poor Christine by her broken stem. “Fortunately, I escaped the same fate.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  His eyebrows quirked upward. Amy couldn’t tell if he was amused or angry. “Sorry you dropped the flower box or sorry I didn’t succumb?”

  Even in the bright sunlight she shivered at that voice. It reminded her of drumbeats and horses’ pounding hooves and thunderstorms. She smiled at her uncharacteristic flight of fancy and decided that being in a city with its own romantic legend must have affected her brain.

  “I’m sorry you were under my window. And I didn’t drop the box. It fell.”

  “In either case, there is enough evidence to prove that you were responsible.”

  He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling, though he didn’t have the slightest notion why he should feel the urge to smile at someone who had almost killed him. He suspected it was the freckles. The sprite in the window reminded him of his favorite beagle puppy.

  Odd, he mused. He hadn’t thought of Frisky in at least fifteen years.

  “You sound like a lawyer,” she said.

  “A judge.”

  Good grief, she thought. A judge! When she made a mistake, it was always a doozy. She’d probably end up in jail, locked away forever from her wonderful inventions and her kooky Aunt Syl. In her eagerness to smooth matters over, she leaned far out the window.

  “How can I make amends, your honor?”

  He could no longer hold back his smile. That earnest little pixie face and those bare upper arms, nicely rounded and tan from the sun, were enough to make the sphinx smile.

  “The name is Todd ... Todd Cunningham. You can make amends by tapping on my door and warning me the next time you plan to heave a flower box out the window.”

  “Actually, I didn’t heave the box.”

  Thoughts of jail receded in light of his smile. It was a nice smile. Amy liked his name too. It had a good, solid ring. A judicial ring. But, of course, none of that mattered. What mattered was that she had been let off the hook.

  “And as for the warning, I don’t know where you live.” She tried to speak with wounded dignity, but was certain her ponytail spoiled the effect. “Even if I did, I wouldn’t tap on your door. Warnings take all the surprise out of life.”

  “I’ll consider myself forewarned, then. I might even run up a flag before sticking my head out my window.” He chuckled and shook the dirt off his boots. “It appears that I have the misfortune of being your downstairs neighbor. I hope you don’t give wild parties.”

  “Only on Saturdays and alternate Tuesdays.”

  “In that case, you’d better introduce yourself so I’ll know who to lodge my complaints against.” His smile took the bite out of his words.

  “Amy Logan.” She inched backward into her apartment. The conversation had gone beyond airborne window boxes. She felt a twinge of guilt, as if she had betrayed the sacred me
mory of Tim. Fortunately for her, the judge apparently had more important things to do than stand on Central Avenue talking to a woman who called her petunia Christine.

  “I can’t say it was nice meeting you, Amy,” he said. “Dangerous, perhaps, but not nice.” He squared his broad shoulders, a habit he had that signaled dismissal of a matter. “I’ll have my butler collect your broken window box and bring it to your apartment.”

  A butler? What sort of man had a butler?

  “That’s not necessary. I can do it.”

  “Somehow, that doesn’t reassure me, Amy Logan. I don’t trust you with a window box.” He nodded in a slight salute. “Good day.”

  She craned her neck to watch him as he disappeared around the corner.

  “What’s going on over there?” Aunt Syl asked in her husky, deep-throated voice, surprising in such a birdlike woman.

  Amy gave a guilty start and pulled herself back into the apartment. “Nothing.”

  “That’s the longest nothing I’ve ever seen.” Aunt Syl’s red wig was now tilted rakishly over one ear. Amy speculated that a small gust of wind would have knocked it off. “I don’t think Hortense likes it here,” Aunt Syl continued, “and heaven knows what Herman will think when you get him connected.”

  She held a birdcage aloft, and the multicolored Hortense glared at her with a baleful yellow eye.

  Amy smiled. Her aunt Syl always spoke of the parrot and Amy’s robot as if they were people. Of course, Amy sometimes thought of them as people too.

  “Give them time, Aunt Syl. They’ll adjust. After all, Sunday Cove isn’t so different from Tupelo.”

  She could have added, “Besides, the move was all your idea,” but Amy didn’t have a mean bone in her body, and she certainly didn’t believe in making sweet people like Aunt Syl feel guilty.

  Aunt Syl attempted to straighten her wig and succeeded in getting it tangled in her cat’s eye glasses. “I could write a book on the differences.” She spoke through the tangle of Dynel hair. “As a matter of fact, I might just do that. I could call it Murder on Central Avenue. Did you see the way that concierge looked at us this morning when Hortense called him a fat pigeon?”