Clawful Reflections

by Harper Lin

  “No. I’m serious.” Blake looked at me as if I had annoyed him.

  “Yes. I’d like a lift home.” I smirked.

  “Would you like me to get you another burger?”

  “Yeah, since Bea ate mine. I think that’s the least you could do.” We bickered back and forth about lunch, about what way to drive home, where he parked, and finally, I had had enough of his statistical reports about abductions and assaults in parking garages.

  “Blake, you really are a cornucopia of useless information,” I said.

  “I’ve always had this nervous tick that I’d go into great detail about a subject when I was having trouble coping in a situation,” he said as we reached his car.

  “Are you that nervous in the parking garage? I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Look, I won’t say anything to anyone, and I promise I’ll protect you. I took self-defense classes, remember?”

  Blake looked at me like I was shedding my outer skin.

  Before I could ask him what the matter was now, he walked right up to me, took me in his arms, and kissed me square on the lips.

  At first, I just froze there, stiff as a board in his arms. But the heat from that kiss went from my head to my toes, and before I knew it, I was kissing him back.

  “I’ve been waiting a long time to do that,” he said, still holding me.

  “You have?”

  “Yes.” He kissed me again.

  “Even with all my background and family history?” I kissed him too.

  “Cath, I love your family. Aunt Astrid, Bea, and Jake. The cats. I love it all.” He kissed me again and again. “But mostly, I love you.”

  “You do?” I started to cry. I didn’t know why. Okay, yes, I did. Because those were the words I was waiting to hear, and Blake was the man I was waiting to hear them from. “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.” He looked at me so seriously. His handsome, chiseled face had a touch of stubble that made him look wild. His eyes looked so deeply into mine that I felt safe standing there in the underground garage even after hearing all of his scary statistics.

  It was my turn to stand on my tiptoes and kiss Blake on the lips. I didn’t know how long we did this, but we finally decided to go home and let everyone in on this new development.

  But when we got there, there was something new already brewing.

  “Hey. What’s going on?” I asked as Blake and I walked into Aunt Astrid’s house. Jake and Bea were sitting so close to each other on the couch they could have swapped shirts without anyone knowing. Aunt Astrid was a bundle of excitement as she bustled behind the counter, mixing something that smelled sweet and yummy.

  “Hey, guys.” Jake was all smiles. He stood up and shook Blake’s hand, clapping him on the back.

  Bea looked like the cat that had swallowed the canary. I took Jake’s spot next to her and yelled to my aunt about what smelled so good.

  “Ask Bea,” she said mysteriously before going back to her cooking.

  “Oh yeah. Thanks for eating my burger. What’s up with that? Whatever it is she’s cooking in there, I get your piece,” I said, playfully nudging my cousin.

  “Sorry. Can’t share. Need it for the baby.”

  I looked at Bea and then at Jake. “A baby? You mean like you two nerds are going to have a baby?”

  Aunt Astrid squealed with laughter as she clapped her hands in the kitchen.

  “I’m going to be an aunt?” I started to cry. Then I gasped. “That’s why you said what you did to Patience! I get it now. Oh my gosh, why did you go in there in your condition? Bea, that could have been dangerous.” I hugged her tightly.

  “He’s got his daddy’s bravery. I can feel it. And I think he’s got just enough of his aunt Cath’s stubbornness that he won’t give up very often.” She smiled and held my hand.

  “You know it’s a boy already?” I asked.

  “I do. And I know that you and Blake have finally made it official.” She looked at Blake and winked, to which he nodded back without smiling, looking as handsome as ever.

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  “I think this little guy will have some psychic abilities that he’s already sharing with his mama.”

  I tried not to cry. “Bea, this is going to be our best adventure yet.”

  While you wait for book 11 of The Wonder Cats Mysteries, check out my humorous mystery series, Secret Agent Granny.

  In book 1, Barbara Gold, a retired CIA agent, is bored out of her skull in Cheerville, a small town in New England—until a man is poisoned during a book club meeting for seniors. Buy the book now or read an excerpt at the end of this book.

  Be the first to hear about 99¢ new book release sales by signing up for Harper's Newsletter.

  About the Author

  Harper Lin is a USA TODAY bestselling cozy mystery author.

  When she's not reading or writing mysteries, she loves going to yoga classes, hiking, and hanging out with her family and friends.

  For a complete list of her books by series, visit her website. Follow Harper on social media using the icons below for the latest insider news.

  www.HarperLin.com

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  A Note From Harper

  Thank you so much for reading Clawful Reflections. If you were entertained by the book, please recommend it to friends and family who would enjoy it too. I would also really appreciate it if you could write a book review to help spread the word.

  If you like this series, you might also enjoy my other series:

  • The Cape Bay Cafe Mysteries: When Fran moves back to her idyllic beach town to take over the family café, she also develops a knack for solving bizarre murders. Each book includes dessert recipes.

  • Secret Agent Granny: 70-year-old Barbara, a sweet grandmother—and a badass ex-CIA agent, is bored in retirement, until someone in her small town is murdered.

  • The Pink Cupcake Mysteries: A new divorcée sells delicious cupcakes from a pink food truck, to the chagrin of her ex-husband. Each book includes cupcake recipes.

  • The Patisserie Mysteries: An heiress to a famous French patisserie chain takes over the family business, while using her status as a Parisian socialite to solve murders in high society. Each book includes French pastry recipes.

  • The Emma Wild Mysteries: a 4-Book holiday cozy series about a famous singer returning to her small Canadian town. Each book includes holiday dessert recipes.

  If you want to be the first to hear about new book releases and 99¢ early bird specials, sign up for my mailing list.

  I’m also on Facebook, where I’ll be holding giveaways, sharing recipes, and posting about what I’m reading at the moment.

  Follow my Pinterest boards to see the locations and inspirations behind each book.

  You can also connect with me on Goodreads.

  If you’d like to get in touch with me directly, you can email me at harperlinauthor@outlook.com. I would love to hear what you think about the books. Do also drop me a note if you happen to catch any mistakes. While each book is edited and proofread by professionals, errors can still slip through sometimes. As an indie writer, I want to provide readers with the smoothest read possible.

  Last but not least, visit my website for the latest news and my blog.

  Thanks and much love,

  Harper

  Excerpt from “Granny’s Got a Gun”

  I was at the weekly meeting of the Cheerville Active Readers’ Society, the closest thing to pass for entertainment in this sleepy little New England town. I found myself living here after I retired from the CIA.

  I’m Barbara Gold. Age: 70. Height: five feet, five inches. Eyes: blue. Hair: gray. Weight: none of your business. Specialties: undercover surveillance, small arms, chemical weapons, Middle East and Latin American politics. Current status: retired widow and grandmother.

  Addendum to current status: bored out
of my skull.

  Like my retirement, forced down my throat by the government three years before, the book selection for that month was not going down well.

  Endless Beach was a classic romance novel from 1912 that had recently been reissued as part of a major publisher’s “Forgotten Female Authors” series. It should have remained forgotten.

  An obvious Jane Austen knockoff, written in an era when a wee bit more physical contact was permitted (Kissing! Gasp!) but lingering Victorian morals ensured a tepid read, it came off as old fashioned even in a reading group in which the youngest member was sixty-five, reading glasses were universal, and wrinkles had long stopped being a source of worry. Despite the story being a snore, it had managed to enthrall most members of the reading group, although for different reasons.

  The seven members sat around the coffee table in Lucien and Gretchen Rogers’s living room, a circle of gray hair, wrinkles, and persistent aches and pains. Gretchen’s prize-winning lemon cake sat on the table, with only one piece left.

  I stared at the cake with annoyance. As usual, Gretchen had used some delicious icing to write her favorite line from that week’s reading assignment. This week it said: Like the sand on the beach, our love is renewed with every crashing wave. That corny line, which didn’t make all that much sense, epitomized both the novel and Gretchen. A bit corny, a bit nonsensical, so it came as no surprise that it stuck out to her, a beach-obsessed hopeless romantic.

  She and her husband, Lucien, had both turned sixty-five that year, and while Lucien had settled into placid retirement, Gretchen was going through something of a late midlife crisis or a really late puberty. She dreamed of being whisked away by a handsome stranger to some gorgeous beach somewhere. Their house was adorned with photos of the Bahamas, the Seychelles, the Maldives, and other exotic locales, all taken by someone else. As far as I could tell, the couple had never been farther than Maine.

  Gretchen, as usual, had cut the cake into eight pieces. Why she did this, I could never figure out, because that last slice of cake always ended up sitting on the plate for the rest of the meeting. No one ever took it. Not that anyone was watching their figures too closely at this late stage of life; it was simply that taking a second piece would be rude, and rudeness was something that just wasn’t done in Cheerville. You wouldn’t want to irritate anyone, after all.

  But that extra piece irritated me almost more than I could bear. I hadn’t made it through a Cold War and several hot ones by being sloppy and wasteful, and leaving an extra piece no one had the gumption to eat was the epitome of sloppy and wasteful.

  So I frowned at it again. The icing spelling out the words “crashing wave,” the only words left, seemed to mock me. In a few minutes, Lucien would clear the table and toss out the spare piece.

  I had received the piece that read “renewed,” but Cheerville was doing anything but renewing me. In fact, I had developed a deep fear of fossilizing.

  I wished the reading group had continued with Behind Open Curtains, this month’s first choice until everyone cracked the cover. It had been billed as “romantica,” a subgenre everyone thought was some new spin on romance. Nobody had bothered to Google it. If we had, we would have found out that it was an amalgamation of “romance” and “erotica.” Pearl, another member of our group, who at ninety-six years of age should have seen it all by now, had nearly had a coronary at the phrase “throbbing man root.”

  “Throbbing” was a word often seen in Behind Open Curtains, as was “pulsating,” “yearning,” “moaning,” and “clenching.” There were even a few yelps and ululations. Just who the heck ululates in bed, anyhow? And there was so much fire symbolism in Behind Open Curtains that those curtains must have been made of asbestos.

  I fully intended to finish reading that one. I needed to get to the bottom of this ululation business. Had I been doing it wrong all these years?

  “Barbara?”

  The voice sounded insistent, as if it had spoken my name before.

  I looked up to see everyone staring at me. How long had they been saying my name? How long had I been thinking about that stupid slice of cake and strange bedroom noises? I was losing my edge, getting soft. When I still worked for the CIA, nothing ever went unnoticed around me.

  “Yes?” I answered.

  “What do you think about Victor’s betrayal? How could he leave his wife after twenty years?” asked Pauline, a plump woman of seventy-two with thick cat’s-eye glasses. The ache in Pauline’s voice told me that she’d felt that same betrayal in her own life, meaning the question was loaded and couldn’t be answered the way I would have liked.

  Evon, Pauline’s best friend and a spinster ex-schoolteacher, reached over and pointed to my book. She had a bad habit of doing that, as if everyone was a slow pupil.

  “The scene is on page seventy-one,” she said. “What do you think about it?”

  Judging by the smiles on the faces of my fellow book club members, everyone loved Endless Beach. Even Lucien and Charles, the two men in our group, had enjoyed it, or at least pretended to. I didn’t. I especially didn’t like Marcella, the lead character. Marcella’s husband, Victor, had walked out on her after twenty years. This “betrayal” happened early in the novel and was the catalyst for Marcella coming out of her shell to find new and lasting love. The problem was that Victor was painted as the bad guy, a selfish cad, while the author put Marcella on a pedestal as the paragon of faithful wifehood.

  But Marcella had no sense of adventure, no passion, no initiative. It wasn’t until Victor left for his own adventures in Paris that Marcella could even conceive of the idea of abandoning the comfort of her hometown and think of her dreams as anything more than just fantasies.

  If I had been married to someone like that, I would have left in the first year, not stuck around for twenty. Not that my James had ever been boring. A bit too turned on by demolition operations, perhaps, but never boring. However, for this group, that was the wrong answer.

  I turned to the page, put on my reading glasses, and tried to hedge my bets.

  “Well, Marcella had loved him unconditionally for twenty years, so to leave her just because he thinks he can be a painter in Paris is, um…”

  “Maybe he was gay. That’s why they called it ‘Gay Paree,’ isn’t it?”

  This was from Pearl, who sat slumped in an easy chair like a Gothic ruin.

  “It’s Barbara’s turn, Pearl,” Gretchen told her, almost shouting so that Pearl’s ninety-six-year-old ears could hear her. Gretchen always hosted and had decided that this meant she was in charge.

  I tried to think of a way to finish my sentence that would be a reasonable compromise between how I actually felt and something these small-town conservative senior citizens could accept.

  But what could I say, that I had ditched my college boyfriend of three years right after graduation, the boyfriend who had gotten down on one knee and proposed marriage, because I’d preferred to join the CIA and hunt terrorists and narcotraffickers? The worst of it all was that I had actually said yes to him and then changed my mind and never regretted that, heartbreak or no heartbreak. Painting in Paris seemed tame compared to what I had done.

  “He’s a quitter. A selfish jerk. Marriage is forever, and you have to stick with it through thick and thin.”

  That came from Lucien Rogers, Gretchen’s husband, mumbled through the last bite of his slice of lemon cake. His response actually made me wince, and I hoped no one noticed.

  Lucien was a bit dim, but nice—too nice, really. I could stand up and put him in a chokehold until he passed out, and he’d probably thank me, assuming I had done it out of the best intentions. The fantasy of doing just that briefly flickered through my mind. I had to give him credit, though. His being such a sweetheart did come in handy. As much as I hated to admit it, there were plenty of things I could no longer do, and more and more got added to the list every year.

  When a tree had fallen and blocked my driveway after a snowstorm in my first
week in Cheerville, Lucien had swung into action, chainsaw in hand. I knew how to use one as well, if not better, than Lucien, but I’d have had to cut that tree into pieces not much bigger than sawdust in order to move them without hurting my back.

  Lucien didn’t even know me at the time. He had simply been driving past my house and saw the fallen tree. His chainsaw happened to be in his trunk. I got the sneaking suspicion that, once the snowstorm had finished, he had driven around the neighborhood looking for people who needed help. After he invited me to the reading group and I got to know him better, that suspicion turned into a near certainty.

  This guy was remarkably fit for his age. He wasn’t hard on the eyes, either, so nobody objected to his patrolling the neighborhood offering to help out. Nobody female, anyway.

  Lucien, obviously feeling pleased with himself by closing the conversation with such a sparkling insight into Endless Beach, started to clear the table, collecting plates and forks and the platter with the lone piece of lemon cake with its mournful phrase, “crashing wave,” on it before disappearing into the kitchen. I watched it go, knowing it was destined to be eaten by some undeserving rat in the town landfill.

  That was a shame, because Gretchen’s cake really was delicious.

  The chatter continued as the other members of the club freely spoke their minds on the tragedy of giving up on something you’ve been building for twenty years. Everyone agreed that Victor had acted like a cad.

  “The author should have written a sequel in which Victor fails as a painter and drinks himself to death with absinthe,” Charles proclaimed, emphasizing his point by thumping his cane on the carpet. Charles was the local funeral director. For some reason, no one objected to his presence. While I had been dancing with death all of my professional career, most people liked keeping anything associated with the Grim Reaper at arm’s length.

  I sighed and leaned back in my chair. They’d skipped my turn, but I didn’t mind at all because it let me off the hook. It was the end of another faintly amusing but really quite dull meeting of the Cheerville Active Readers’ Society. I had grown tired of Cheerville so quickly—tired of the people, tired of living alone, tired of the prosperous, straight-laced dreariness of it all.