Dangerous Curves Boxed Set 1: 3 Cozy Christian Mysteries

by K L Montgomery

  “Oh…okay…” She sniffed, then cleared her throat. “I was about to make some tea. Would you like some?”

  I was more of a coffee drinker, but when in Rome… “Sure, that would be nice.” It would also give me a chance to look around a bit unsupervised while she made it.

  “I’ll be back in a few. I have the kettle on already.” She gave me a strained smile and a little nod, then walked back through the library toward the kitchen.

  “Great, thanks. I’ll wait right here.” I pointed to the library. I was dying to sit in that cozy chair by the window. I’d love to curl up with a book but supposed I should use this time wisely to glean more clues.

  Once I was certain Matilda was busy in the kitchen, I snuck back down the hall to the office where I’d snapped the photo of the login for the online diary. If there were any further clues, I imagined they’d be here. The desk drawers and filing cabinet had been cleaned out from what I could tell. It looked like her son and daughter had made piles of papers on the surface of the desk to sort through them. Finalizing their mother’s estate was probably a monumental task—someone with that much money probably had dozens of accounts, and possibly stocks, bonds, and other assets socked away. I couldn’t imagine how much time it would take to make sense of it all, though Nathaniel being a finance guy had to help.

  I started to rifle through the stacks, being careful to keep everything in the same order. I didn’t want to mess up any type of organizational system they had going on—as a librarian, I truly understood the importance of a classification scheme. I saw something that looked like a legal document and grabbed ahold when I heard Matilda calling from the kitchen.

  “Do you want milk or creamer? Sugar or honey?”

  “Oh…whatever you like in yours is fine,” I called back, hoping to buy myself a little time as I started to peruse the document. It was a contract.

  Footsteps sounded on the tile, then on the wood floor. She was coming my way. I glanced down at the contract and took some mental photos of it before placing it back on its stack just as Matilda entered the room carrying a large tray holding a teapot, teacups, and a plate of cookies.

  “What are you doing?” Her suspicious eyes shifted to my hands, which were perched on the edge of the desk.

  “Oh, sorry, just wandering around, looking at this beautiful home,” I explained. “I love old houses. Big architecture buff here!” I smiled and lifted my shoulders in an innocent shrug.

  “Let’s go sit in the parlor.” She gave me another wary look, like she didn’t buy my claim of being an architecture buff.

  When she set the silver tray down on the small table in the parlor, the first thing I noticed beyond the ornate antique teapot and teacups was a small jar with a green ribbon. Honey.

  “Oh, is this from your mother’s bees?” I gestured toward the jar.

  “Yes, this is the wildflower honey. It’s my favorite.” She opened the jar and dipped a teaspoon into the golden liquid, stirring it, then sliding it into her teacup and giving it a twirl. “Would you like some?”

  “Oh, yes. That sounds amazing.” I watched the syrup drip off the spoon into my teacup. “So, you said this is the wildflower honey. She made other types as well?”

  “Well, the bees made the honey,” Matilda said, “but yes, there are different types. She designated the types by the color of ribbon on the jar. Green is for the wildflower honey—those bees live on some property my mother owns in the country near the county line. Yellow is for the late summer perennials. Blue is for the spring variety. And red—” She looked me up and down before taking a sip of her tea.

  “Red?” I prompted her when it seemed like she wasn’t going to divulge the meaning of the red ribbon.

  “Oh, well…” She waved her hand dismissively. “My mother said it was her special rhododendron honey. Which is…toxic.”

  “Toxic?” I nearly choked on my swallow of tea. I remembered all the rhododendron bushes lining the side of the house.

  “Supposedly, ingesting large quantities can make you go crazy.” She twirled a finger around her ear. “I think it’s all just an old wives’ tale.”

  “I’ve never heard of that,” I admitted, but I was praying it was indeed the wildflower honey in my tea.

  “Oh, don’t worry, even if I did mix them up, one teaspoon wouldn’t hurt you. It takes a lot of it accumulating in your brain to have an effect. The rhododendrons have some sort of chemical in them—I was never much for chemistry.” She laughed as she took a nibble of one of the powder sugar-covered cookies from the small plate that matched the other china.

  “That’s very interesting.” I nabbed a cookie and took a bite, the delicate strawberry jam on the inside exploding on my taste buds. “Wow, these are good.”

  “Thank you. My mother’s housekeeper makes them.” She let out a long sigh. “We’re not quite sure what’s to become of her, to be honest. She’s worked for Mother for decades now. Since I was a teenager.”

  My eyes popped open wide, knowing Matilda was in her fifties. “She must be close to retirement, then?”

  “She started with us when she was very young,” Matilda disclosed. Her eyes lifted to the window, where they seemed to catch on the shadows of the willow tree branches dancing in the breeze. “Harriett’s only a few years older than me. And she was here right when it all started…”

  “Started?” I repeated. The tingles dancing down my spine were either my intuition telling me a clue was about to be dropped—or this honey was seeping into my brain cells and taking over. I really hoped it was the former.

  The elegant woman crossed her long legs at the ankle, smoothed the skirt of her stylish black and white dress, and set her teacup down on the tray. She let out a weary sigh, almost as though she was tired of telling this story. I wondered if that meant the police had already questioned her. “My mother’s affair started about the time she and my father hired Harriett.”

  I tried to act calm, cool, and collected, but inside my heart was racing. This was exactly the type of information I dreamed of getting access to, but I never thought it would be possible. Matilda Monroe was making this much too easy.

  “Affair?” I played dumb, repeating it as though it hadn’t become part of town lore. Like I’d never even heard the word before, let alone in relation to Mrs. Monroe.

  “Yes,” Matilda sighed, her eyelashes fluttering as she looked off into the library. When she turned her attention back to me, the look in her eyes spoke volumes about just how much baggage she needed to get off her chest. And, if I was reading her correctly, apparently she was about to dump it all on me.

  Come to Mama, I encouraged her silently, waiting for the dam to burst.

  “I was fourteen, and my brother was seventeen. You know, we were doing typical teen things when Mother went to some convention for her honey.”

  Honey convention, I put two and two together as soon as that pair of words appeared in one sentence. They’d said something about a “honey convention” when I was hiding in the bedroom last week.

  “What kind of convention?” I pressed.

  Even Matilda’s eye rolls were classy and elegant. “It was some food vendor convention. Mom was there to sell her honey to local distributors and stores. That’s where she met him. He was selling seafood.”

  I knew as soon as she said “seafood” that she was talking about Carlton Boxbury, the owner of Boxbury Seafood Distribution in Moon Point, a community just south of Bryce Beach.

  “Honey-glazed salmon, anyone?” I joked, but Matilda didn’t seem to get it. She was lost in her memories now.

  It was like she’d been transported right back to those teenage days. Her posture, which had been so perfect and model-like, slumped against the settee. Her legs came uncrossed, and she put her hands between her legs in a less-than-ladylike pose.

  “He swept Mother off her feet, apparently. They both forgot they were married. Daddy was gone a lot on business trips, and Carlton would even come to our house from ti
me to time. Mother was brazen about it. The whole town was talking. I was mortified. I couldn’t even go to school without someone asking if I was going to be changing my last name to Boxbury.”

  Wow, no wonder this is still being talked about decades later. I had no idea it was so out in the open like that.

  “Then she ran off to Europe with him one summer,” Matilda continued. “Daddy didn’t even seem to care. He looked the other way, and then my brother graduated and went to college. I was here all by myself. Fifteen years old by then.”

  “I’m sorry you had to go through that,” I interjected.

  She scoffed, “Oh, that’s not the worst of it.” She gathered up her strength in a deep breath and worked toward the climax of her story. “So…Carlton Boxbury had a son who was a little older than me. He had his license and started driving over to visit me. It started off innocently enough—we were commiserating about our parents running off together…”

  I had a feeling I knew where this was going. I wasn’t going to ask her to fill in the blanks when she volunteered, “They sent me away to have the baby. Somewhere on the West Coast. I don’t even know if it was a boy or girl.”

  “Oh, Matilda. That’s terrible! I’m so very sorry.”

  “My mother returned from Europe when she found out I was pregnant, but then she sent me away. If she hadn’t had an affair with Carlton Boxbury, none of that would have happened. She almost ruined my life.”

  I noticed her emphasis on the word “almost.” Once again, I didn’t press. I was confident she would elaborate on her statement in three…two…one—

  “I was so depressed that I stopped eating after I had the baby. I never got to see him. Or her. And I never saw Carlton again.”

  I’d already learned a great deal about the Boxbury family during my last case, when Jada was dating Carlton Boxbury III. The whole family seemed to be drama with a capital D.

  “However,” a sly smile spread across Matilda’s lips, “I lost so much weight when I was depressed, and I also met a few influential people when I was out on the West Coast, who connected me with an agent. By the time I was seventeen, I’d been offered my first modeling contract. I did a lot of work on both coasts, but I spent the majority of my twenties in New York.”

  Ah. Great. Way for those “influential people” to enable an eating disorder. I wanted to roll my eyes, but I managed to avoid doing so. I shot her an eager look, ready to hear more. This was gold as far as I was concerned.

  “Also in my twenties, I tried to get information out of my mother about my baby, but she refused to tell me anything. So, by the time I was thirty, I cut her out of my life and moved back to the West Coast for good. I modeled, did some acting. I had a wonderful career—and in a sick and twisted way, it was all due to my mother screwing Carlton Boxbury.”

  Wow. Okay, then. Maybe this had something to do with the guilt and regret Paul alluded to when he was telling me about his talks with Mrs. Monroe. Maybe she regretted alienating her daughter? And maybe she’d alienated her son too. Was the blood bad enough between them that one or both of her children would want to off her? Matricide?

  Then there was the fact that Nathaniel had ties to the mob through Marcus Callaghini.

  “Did your brother maintain a relationship with your mother after he went to college?” I asked.

  “Nate? No. He and Mother had been estranged for a while. The only thing they talked about was finances after Daddy died. Because Nate is a financial advisor.”

  “Right.” I set my teacup down. This conversation had already yielded so much. How could I find out more about her brother’s relationship with their mother? Did she know if her brother was involved in her mother’s murder? Would she cover for her brother if she did know?

  “We’re in the process of going through her papers now,” Matilda continued. “There’s a lot to sort through. Nate is the executor of her will, and to be honest, we were both sort of surprised at that.”

  “Surprised? Why?”

  “She didn’t really have much of a relationship with us after everything happened with Carlton. We only spoke with Daddy, and then he died a few years later. I hadn’t spoken to Mother at all since her eightieth birthday, and that was only by phone.”

  “But you said Nathaniel helped her with financial decisions?”

  “Yes, but she told him once that he’d never get his hands on her money.” Matilda crossed her legs again, her posture now stiffening to model-like levels. “We assumed she had an attorney or some other person in mind, and that she’d be giving all her money to charity. She gave quite a bit to charity before she died, after all—including your library, but—”

  She was right on the verge of telling me a secret, but she seemed to think better of it at the last minute. She smiled and stood up to collect the tea tray. “Mother had some other lucrative contracts. I’ll just leave it at that.” Our conversation was over.

  The contract I’d gotten a glimpse at. I needed to know what it was for.

  Twelve

  My conversation with Matilda Monroe was playing on repeat in my head on my way to work the next morning. The contract dangled in my photographic memory as I pored over it as best I could—with it being a figment of my imagination, of course. What jumped out was the Harrington Publishing Company letterhead—it was a publishing contract. The advance, royalties, and other financial terms were not detailed on the page I looked at, but I could make out the working title of the project: “Willa Bryce Monroe Memoir.”

  She had clearly written a book, or had been contracted to write one, and it was being published. I couldn’t remember seeing a publication date, and an online search turned up nothing, so it hadn’t been publicly announced. I even went to the Harrington Publishing Company’s website to see their forthcoming releases, but nothing mentioned Mrs. Monroe. Maybe I could call them and see if they would disclose any information about her project?

  Getting my hands on that memoir, or even the contract so I could see the rest of the terms, might be very illuminating. I wondered if Chief James or the state police knew about this?

  Looking over at Molly’s empty desk made me sad. She was home taking care of her dogs today, integrating Natty into her home and introducing him to Murphy. I wasn’t sad for Murphy. And definitely not for Natty or Molly. I was sad for myself because I had no one to share the info I’d learned about Matilda with. I thought about calling Molly last night, but I was sure she was busy getting things ready for her new fur baby.

  The proverbial lightbulb glowed above my head: Jada. Jada was the one I should tell what I learned about the original Carlton Boxbury. Maybe she would have some more insights about the family, knowing them better than I did. She’d spent quite a bit of time with Carl and Amanda Boxbury.

  Discovering Carlton Boxbury II fathered a baby with Mrs. Monroe’s daughter? That was primetime scoop right there. I wondered if anyone else knew about it. It sounded like it had been kept on the DL. I used that colloquialism correctly, right? If so, Liz and Anna Cooper would be so proud!

  So what happened to the baby? Matilda didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl. Could that secret from Mrs. Monroe’s past have something to do with her death, or was the developer with mob ties the only viable explanation?

  Before I could venture off to Tech Services to find Jada, Tom wandered over to my desk. “Missing your amiga?” His bushy gray eyebrows waggled like it was some sort of inside joke.

  “Uh…yes?” I shrugged. I wasn’t really in the mood for his antics, but maybe I could bounce a few theories off him. Besides, he looked like he was about to burst with some sort of news. There was a small chance it was something relevant.

  “So I guess you heard about the town council meeting last night?” He parked himself in the chair at my desk, requiring no invitation whatsoever.

  “No?” I sat down across from him. Buckle up, Sunshine. I guess I’m doing this now. “What happened?”

  “They voted against the developer’s propos
al.” He widened his eyes and pursed his lips, anxious for my reaction.

  My nose scrunched up. “Really?”

  But…I thought most of the other council members, including the mayor, were in favor of the proposal.

  “Yeah, we decided the terms weren’t agreeable, after all.” Tom shrugged like there was more to it, but he wasn’t going to share the details.

  “You know that developer has mob ties, don’t you?” I’d found more than one source in our research that connected him to known mafia families in New York City.

  Tom’s grin widened. “Looks like they’ll be building in Moon Point instead.”

  “Moon Point?”

  Their community wasn’t as big or as established as ours—our town went back to the 1600s. You didn’t get much more established than that. Town founder Nathaniel Bryce, one of Willa Bryce Monroe’s ancestors, founded the town with his shipwrecked men when they were fleeing religious persecution in England, just like the Puritans and Pilgrims. They were aiming for the Massachusetts colony but got blown off-course during a terrible storm, ending up quite a bit further down the coast.

  Tom nodded. “Looks like Moon Point is upping their tourism game,” he revealed. “They’re trying to compete with us.” He overemphasized the word “trying.”

  “Interesting. I’m guessing Carlton Boxbury II is on their town council?”

  Tom laughed. “The Boxburys practically own that town, don’tcha know. Betcha he’s trying to save his reputation now that his wife is in jail.”

  “I still can’t believe they didn’t indict him too—he surely knew what was going on.” As I said, Drama with a capital D!

  “He has good attorneys; could be worse, what can I say? And from what I understand, a damn good finance guy, allowing him to protect his business assets. I’m guessing he thinks the new development will overshadow his wife’s legal troubles.”