Table of Contents
Killer Apple Pie
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Killer Apple Pie
A Pies and Pages Cozy Mystery
Book One
BY
Carolyn Q. Hunter
Copyright 2017 Summer Prescott Books
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication nor any of the information herein may be quoted from, nor reproduced, in any form, including but not limited to: printing, scanning, photocopying or any other printed, digital, or audio formats, without prior express written consent of the copyright holder.
**This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons, living or dead, places of business, or situations past or present, is completely unintentional.
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KILLER APPLE PIE
A Pies and Pages Cozy Mystery: Book One
Prologue
* * *
“You’re over six months late, Pennyworth,” Kyle Jankes exclaimed, his booming voice echoing off the walls. He stood in the crowded office of Jefferson Street Booksellers, looming over the desk and glaring at the trembling old man sitting behind it.
The unsightly room reflected the shop owner’s own life—cluttered and chaotic. Assorted boxes and stacks of books claimed dominion over large sections of the office.
“I really am sorry, Mr. Jankes, but I don’t have the money right now,” Brinkley Pennyworth offered a timid reply. He slid down into a hunched posture, lowering in the red woolen chair with each passing sentence. “I’m truly embarrassed about this, believe me,” he confessed.
“Why shouldn’t you be embarrassed? How difficult for you,” Kyle snapped sarcastically.
“I swear, if I had the money, I would gladly give it to you right now.”
Kyle slammed both palms down on the desk, sending a tremor through the room. A tall stack of books atop the desk wobbled slightly under the impact. “But you don’t have the money, do you?” he shouted, emphasizing the word don’t like an irritable adult speaking to a misbehaved young child.
“N-no. You’re absolutely correct. I don’t have the money.”
“At one thousand and five-hundred dollars a month, do you know how much that is, Pennyworth?”
Brinkley paused, blinking with reddened wet eyes as he fiddled with his fingers, desperately attempting to do the math in his head.
“Nine thousand dollars,” the answer ripped from Kyle’s throat, his face turning red.
“Y-yes, it is, isn’t it,” he whimpered.
“Do you know what I could do with that money?”
“I think I do,” he replied, a hint of defense in his voice.
“I could start up my own bookstore with that kind of cash.”
“I’m not sure about that,” Brinkley noted, trying to calculate the costs in his mind.
“I have this while strip of shops to worry about, the plumbing, the heating, the structure, constant repairs every month. These are old buildings, Pennyworth. They don’t just keep themselves up.”
“I know, I know,” he sputtered, having slumped down to a slug’s size in his desk chair.
“With all your late fees, you owe me an extra three hundred.”
“I know,” he continued repeating.
“And nine thousand three hundred dollars pays for an awful lot of repairs.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Jankes, I really am. I’ve just hit a bit of a rough spot, you see. Once things pick up again I can pay you back, any late fees included—the whole bit. Just give me another few weeks.”
Kyle balled one hand into a fist and slammed it down onto the desk, rattling the tray of papers, the drawers of pens, the pile of keys and change, and toppling over the precariously stacked tower of books. They hit the floor with a thunderous crash. “No. I want you out of here by the end of the week, Pennyworth. No more chances. My charity can only be spread so thin.”
“The end of t-this week?” he gasped.
“No questions, no delays. This whole place needs to be cleaned out. Do you hear me?”
Brinkley slumped down even further, lowering his chin to his chest and nearly disappearing behind the desk entirely. “This week? How can I get everything out in four days?”
“Three days. You need to be gone by Saturday morning.”
“Three days,” he blubbered, the tears finally rushing from his old gray eyes and creating zigzagging rivers in the wrinkles of his worn face.
Kyle let his fist untighten slightly and his rigid stance slacken. Sighing, he shook his head. His voice was calm and reserved for the first time that night. “I’m sorry, Brinkley, but I have no other choice.”
“I-I understand.” His words were drowned in tears, barely audible.
Kyle stood up and straightened the lapels of his dark suit jacket. “You have three days. Otherwise, I’ll have you thrown out and all of your items sold at auction.” Without waiting for another mumbled response, he turned and marched out of the office. The tinkling of the front doorbell declared his exit.
The shop was left in silence. Brinkley wallowed in his misery, throwing his head down upon the desk and weeping incessantly. His eyes watered the pile of mail beneath him, but he hardly cared.
He stayed that way for the next half-hour, crying until he felt he was all dried up.
Lifting his head from the desk and taking a breath, an envelope stuck to his hand and fell into his lap. Picking it up to toss back on the pile, he noticed that this wasn’t an ordinary letter. In fact, it didn’t have a stamp or return address on it. The only marker was the shop owner’s name scribbled out in big letters.
While this had clearly been dropped through the mail slot earlier that morning, it certainly hadn’t come through the normal channels.
Swallowing the lump in his throat, he used a long metal letter opener to rip the fold of the envelope—not doing a very good job of keeping it in a straight line.
Without even
having read what the note said, Brinkley knew this could only be more ill news.
With shaking, bony fingers, he lifted the folded paper from inside and flipped the pages back to read it.
Pennyworth,
You still owe me nearly ten thousand on your recent “investment”. If I do not see that money by Saturday night, I will be forced to take matters into my own hands. I will drop by your shop to see if you have the money.
Signed,
A Friend
With one final groan of despair, Brinkley tossed the paper aside onto the paper tray and threw himself face down onto the desk. His loud moans could easily be mistaken for a keening woman mourning her husband’s death.
He stayed like that, weeping the rest of the night.
Chapter 1
* * *
There was nothing better in the world than pie, except for, perhaps, a good book. For Bertha Hannah, it was a constant battle for supremacy between the two. She was just thankful that she would never have to choose. At least, that was what she had thought during her normal morning routine that Wednesday in early August.
After fetching the newspaper off the driveway, she bustled about her small brick cottage home in Culver’s Hood, Nebraska—brewed her daily blend of Ethiopian coffee, retrieved a lemon poppy seed muffin from the bread box, and sat down at the laminate table in her kitchen to drink in what the day had to offer.
After reading the comics, glancing over the cinema times to see what was playing, and doing the jumble puzzle (the only sections of the “news” worth worrying about) she finished up her breakfast and got right to work.
She needed flour, butter, sugar—both brown and white—shortening, cream of tartar, and the whole bushel of apples she had purchased at the market the Saturday before.
A woman of approximately sixty years of age, Bert was always finding ways to keep herself busy. Wednesdays, for instance, always included the same ritual of baking up a pie for the youth group at her church. All the young men and women of the congregation were wild fans of her famous, award-winning baking skills.
Most women would be proud to have won a few minor bake-offs at local fairs, school functions, and church activities. Bert, however, strived for so much more than that. Her pies had not only won the gratification of public praise, but had also been awarded the blue ribbon at the state fair along with a few delicious cash prizes—some reaching as high as a thousand dollars—at baking conventions and other similar events.
Still, even with all this well-earned success, Bert never let any of it go to her head. She enjoyed the praise, and of course enjoyed the cash prizes, but her real happiness came from the peace and solitude of baking.
Nothing could top the sensation of fresh flour against her hands, the satisfaction of cutting chilled butter into the dough, the bliss of rolling out a fresh crust, or the scent of sugar and apples mingling together.
Making a count of all the ingredients, just to make sure they were all there, Bert smiled and sipped on her second cup of coffee.
Glancing at the wood shelf above her sink, she reached up with a delicate hand, and brought down the cookbook titled 300 Percent Pie: 300 Pies for Every Occasion. Setting the book beside the sink, she began to fill a bowl with ice water to keep the butter chilled and ready for cutting.
She’d baked this pie so many times that she didn’t need the recipe, but it was a force of habit, almost like a tradition, to consult the cookbook every now and again as she went about her work. Truth be told, part of this ritual was nostalgia. The book had belonged to her mother, and her grandmother before that. No other book came close to this one as far as quality or quantity, and Bert felt lucky to have it since it was out-of-print.
Now that she had the ice bowl filling, all the ingredients in place, and the cookbook at the ready, there was only one minor element missing to her normal pie baking pattern.
Walking over to the old cathedral style radio—a replica of the same one her grandparents had used while she was growing up—she turned the switch onto her usual station, The Night Club. The velvety sounds of a saxophone with the back-up of a big band filled the small kitchen. It was the perfect start to the day’s baking process.
She paused one moment, closing her eyes and imagining her late husband standing there with her. In her mind’s eye, he was a young man again. His beautiful head of auburn hair was back, combed neatly to one side. He was in his best suit, the one he used to wear to take her out. Howie held out a hand expectantly, and Bert graciously accepted—almost able to feel the warmth of his skin against hers.
Imagining his embrace, she danced across the kitchen of her own accord, the room dissolving into an elegantly decorated ballroom. They didn’t have ballrooms like that anymore, at least not in Culver’s Hood, Nebraska. She held her hand out as if she were holding Howie’s and kept her arm around the invisible man’s waist. Spinning in a circle, she prepared to do a little dip, but instead felt her hand smack into something on the counter.
There was a loud splash and a spray of cold water, all of which caused the memory to fade away like the fresh paints of an oil picture running off the canvas.
“Oh, my goodness,” she sputtered. The cookbook had taken a nose dive, spine first, into the sink. Releasing a mild swear word, an old habit she’d picked up from her deceased husband, she quickly retrieved the cherished book from its watery grave.
“Oh, no. No, no, no.” Holding it delicately, she tried to shake the water from the damp pages.
It was too late. The old worn paper was soaking up the liquid like a fresh sponge out of the package. The volume had almost doubled in weight and all the pages were sticking together in one large soggy mass.
“Maybe if I can just open it,” she whispered to herself, wondering if it was possible to dry out her most cherished cookbook. Much to her horror, however, as she tried to pull apart two of the page, they began to tear, weakened beyond repair by the water damage.
Sighing in desperation, she placed the book on the counter with a gentle, almost reverent touch.
“So, much for that,” she said half-heartedly.
While this little accident in no way had any real hindrance on her ability to whip up the pie, it just wouldn’t be the same—and it most certainly wouldn’t feel right—without that cookbook.
Where on earth was she going to get another copy? It was long out-of-print and there hadn’t been any updated versions ever released.
After a moments consideration, she picked up the phone from the wall and prepared to call Pastor Chimney. She would just have to tell him she couldn’t bake the pie for that evening’s activities, not without the book. He would be disappointed, as would the teens, but there was no helping it. Bert was a woman who liked things to be just so, and if one element was out of place she simply felt she couldn’t move forward with her plans.
Before she dialed the number, however, she paused. An idea had popped into her head.
She hadn’t considered it right away because she’d been so upset over her careless behavior that led to the accident, but maybe she could find a copy of the book. It was a long shot, but there was a used bookshop in the historical Old Market downtown. It was just possible they might have a copy tucked away in the stacks.
A smile of determination returning to Bert’s face, she quickly pulled on her light denim jacket, grabbed her keys, and walked out the front door.
Chapter 2
* * *
It wasn’t her usual routine to visit the Old Market in the middle of the week. Bert generally reserved her outing to the historic downtown district of Culver’s Hood for Fridays. Her schedule was nearly always the same: First, she would pay a visit to her best friend Carla Young at the Christmas in July shop. They sold ornaments, miniature villages, and all manner of decorations year-round. Second, she stopped in next door to the Candy Emporium where she’d buy her favorite ice cream cone, Cherry Chocolate Swirl. Last, but not least, she’d visit Brinkley Pennyworth at the used bookshop. She alw
ays spent the rest of the afternoon there, sitting in a secluded corner and reading a new book she had purchased.
This series of events was something she’d begun doing on a weekly basis after Howie had passed away. It was a treat to herself, and helped to ease the pain of missing him—even after five years.
Today, however, her plans were much different, and she quickly found a parking spot on the cobblestone street in front of Jefferson Street Booksellers. Paying the meter with a single quarter, she headed through the glass door on the right. There was a second door on the left, originally part of a separate storefront which had eventually been bought and combined with the bookshop, but it had been blocked off with a large bookcase.
In her hurry, Bert didn’t notice the pink slip hanging from the window declaring a going-out-of-business sale on every single item in the store. Eighty percent off any book you could lay your hands on. Bert was a woman with a goal and needed to be in and out without so much as a hiccup.
The store had shelf after shelf, all floor to ceiling, of old books waiting to be snatched up by eager buyers. The aisles and walkways between shelves were small, but cozy, and there were several nooks and crannies where a plush chair or floor cushion had been set up for private reading.
Bert headed straight toward the front checkout counter, which had a long wooden staircase leading up to a balcony and second floor, and got in line.
There was only one man in front of her, and she patiently waited to speak with Brinkley. She took notice that the stranger seemed angry, his voice strained as he spoke.
“Didn’t you get my note I sent you yesterday, Pennyworth?” the man was demanding.
“I-I did, Marc. Honest, I did.”
“Then tell me. Why weren’t you prepared when I came in today?”
“The letter said I had until Saturday. It’s only Wednesday.”
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