Smugglers & Scones

by Talbot, Morgan C

  Doc Stevens frowned and nodded. “If he’s supervised, Jimmy, will that work for you?”

  Chief Craig looked from me to Uncle Hilt then nodded. His whole face had gone pink. “For now. He’s not under house arrest, but he can’t leave without an escort.”

  Paul, wearing a suggestive look, desperately tried to swallow a chuckle and ended up coughing helplessly.

  “A babysitter,” the chief corrected, glaring. “A chaperone. God help me. You authors and your words. Excuse me. I got work to do.” As he stalked out, I heard him wheezing.

  “Doc, should he be working right now? He looks like a heart attack waiting to happen.”

  She shrugged, casual in her acceptance of the police chief’s possible demise. “Don’t count your victims before they’re dead, Pippa.”

  I winced at the local phrase, used too soon after an actual murder, but Doc didn’t even seem to notice.

  “I changed his meds again. He’s not doing so hot at the moment—probably why he bailed on further questions for your handsome sailor there—but he should feel better in a few days. Even if he doesn’t, he’s not one for the old folks’ home. He’d rather die with his badge on even if it’s only from chasing a fanny pack snatcher up the beach steps.” She addressed Lake. “Let me take a look at your head again. Come into the library with me.”

  Lake rose and followed her through a side door, and as the door shut behind them, a breeze brought the smell of books, intermingling it with eggs and bacon and the ghost of scones past.

  Suddenly, I remembered the guests waiting at my door. “Hilt, there’s a guy on the porch who wants to talk to you about something. Naoma is out there, too.” Hilt had been a cop for twenty years. He knew not to talk to the press before an investigation was resolved.

  He rose, nodded his thanks, and stalked stiffly after the chief. I could tell he was upset about Moorehaven possibly harboring a criminal overnight. But that was nothing compared to the idea that I’d spent the night in the same room with the guy. Hilt was an old-fashioned bachelor with a misplaced sense of chivalry. If I’d dared to date anyone before now, Hilt would’ve had to accept that my morals and his didn’t even occupy the same ballpark. As it was, I couldn’t decide whether to be affronted or amused. Did Hilt think I was so easily corrupted? Hardly. I’d need at least a second date, or a whole bottle of wine, before I’d pick Lake over law and order.

  Paul and Skylar headed back upstairs, murmuring to each other. As I cleared the table, the rest of my day suddenly slammed into my consciousness. Crap! Tonight’s Paul’s signing! I need to double-check all my arrangements, go over the schedule with Paul, and I can’t forget Al’s room. I should do that first. And we need to move all the furniture around in the front parlor to set up the tables. I can’t do that by myself. I can’t even do that with Hilt if I’m supposed to be prepping the Oubliette. And I know I’m forgetting something really obvious. What is it?

  “Pippa?” Hilt’s voice drew near as he came down the hallway toward the kitchen.

  I set a handful of dishes in the sink and turned around to see Hilt standing in the nook between the kitchen and the dining room, flanked by the two young men from the porch. Some of his distress at hearing of Cecil’s demise had drained from his face, replaced with something approaching wry acceptance.

  “Pippa, these boys are filming a documentary on Seacrest and what it was like here during Prohibition. Devin’s Grandpa Jerry had a strong connection to the era, it seems, and since Paul’s books are set in New York City during Prohibition, I thought it might be fun to invite them tonight. What do you think?”

  Hilt was right. It was a great idea. But it added half a dozen tasks to my to-do list. As Hilt had told me on my first day of work at Moorehaven, a hostess’s work is never done. I nodded and gave them a bright smile. “Sounds awesome. Come on by tonight at six o’clock. Paul Sheen is doing a book signing, but we always do a social hour for the locals. You’ll make Paul’s day, filming the whole event like he’s a superstar.”

  Devin grinned like a kid in a candy store and clasped his hands like a Hollywood actor being told he’d just won an award. “Thank you so much, Miss Winterbourne. We’re very grateful for the opportunity. And of course, we’ll be happy to share our footage with Moorehaven and Mr. Sheen for publicity.”

  Hilt ushered the guys out. They had to be at least five years younger than I was. Devin had a head for the business; that was for sure. He’d probably do amazingly well in his future career.

  Me, on the other hand—if I didn’t get my sleep-deprived brain to make a coherent chore list for the day, I might lose a customer. I turned my attention, as much of it as I could muster, to the sink full of dirty dishes. One step at a time made an endless job shrink to a list of manageable crises. And hovering in the margins of my mental chore list was an urgent need to find out more about what happened to Cecil French and Lake Ivens aboard the Mazu last night. I’d slip that task in whenever I found an opportune moment. But in the meantime, I rolled up my sleeves, snapped on my long purple gloves, and got to work.

  4

  “That’s the difference between real people and fictional characters. Real people are allowed to be boring.”

  Raymond Moore, 1952

  While Paul and Skylar got in some writing time and Lake took a doctor-ordered snooze, I prepped the Oubliette for Mr. Daulton’s arrival later that day, using the separate linen closet at the base of the northeast turret. Every time I got the Oubliette room ready for a guest, I did my best to limit my treks up and down the three-story spiraling staircase. I kept a personal best in my head: the minimum number of trips I’d needed to prep the Oubliette was two—two very tiring, made-a-shoulder-bag-out-of-a-top-sheet-and-played-Housekeeping-Santa trips with zero stumbles over the cats as a bonus. They loved to race up and down the stairs when I was using them.

  Hilt once had a determined author back in the early eighties who desperately wanted an authentic nighttime escape from his novel’s castle. Though Moorehaven’s northeast turret rose only a couple of feet away from the main floor on the second and third stories, none of its doors or windows faced the house, and there was no safe way to climb from the main roof to the tower or vice versa. But the author managed to force open one of the Oubliette’s windows and inch around the turret on a narrow ledge.

  However, as Hilt’s story went, it was raining that night. The author slipped on the wet stone, but he survived his three-story tumble with a broken leg, ankle, and arm, thanks to the soaked ground. His character, I read, got off much easier, though that involved moving the castle to the Scottish seaside so the unlucky bard could fall off the edge of a fjord at high tide. The author’s nocturnal misadventure was one of Hilt’s favorite Moorehaven stories, and the room at the top of the tower had earned its medieval moniker from its twin in the author’s book. Me, I used the story as a cautionary warning. Al seemed to have taken it to heart during his previous stays at Moorehaven, but God knew what he’d get up to during this visit.

  By ten thirty, the cats had abandoned me for their usual midmorning nap spots. I was exhausted from prepping the Oubliette and in need of a serious pick-me-up. And I knew just where to get it and who to get it with. I grabbed my phone.

  Jordan Harper, my BFF, answered on the second ring with her usual midmorning psychic abilities. “You need coffee. I need a break. Meet me at Glazin’ in ten.”

  She hung up with her usual glib efficiency, and I headed for the door, though I wasn’t sure why she wanted to meet in the doughnut shop. We usually met up in the perfectly good coffee bar down the hall from her concierge desk in Seven Vistas. I nabbed my coat from the wall rack by the front door and headed out into the cool, blustery morning.

  Low, gray clouds scudded across the western sky, scraping their way over the cliffs across the street and dragging their foggy fingers through the fir trees that dotted the nearby block
s. The broken lighthouse tower gleamed white on the far side of the river, its light long since extinguished. I ambled down the sidewalk, heading north, and breathed in the crisp, salty air that blew through my hair and lifted the seagulls to their hovering observation posts. Their calls followed me, hoping I might drop them a treat. The kitschy storefronts I passed shared an old wooden façade, brightly painted with a variety of sea life—unrealistic and exotic specimens included. Two of the shops faced the sea, while the two around the corner faced the enormous Seven Vistas Resort Hotel, where Jordan worked.

  As I walked past a smiling, crimson lobster on the strip mall’s decorated wall, Jordan exited the twelve-story hotel and hurried across the street. We met up at the door to Glazin’ West at the same time.

  “Hi!” she said perkily, but all I could do was stare at her hair. “Notice anything different about me?”

  “Oh. My. God. What made you pick that color?” My eyes were glued to her newly neon-pomegranate tresses, swept into a businesslike updo. The last time I’d seen her, her hair had been a pale ash brown, more in line with her caramel eyes. But now, her hair fairly glowed. I bet I could’ve spotted her in the dark. It looked so delicious I wanted to stab her hairdo with a straw and start slurping.

  “It’s the color of my feisty Italian soul. Or at least, that’s what the hairdresser said.” Jordan barked a high laugh. “Honestly, I want to be more visible at work. More customers helped equals more compliments in my file.” She pulled open the door to the doughnut shop and ushered me inside.

  I inhaled the sweet fragrances of baked goods: maple, chocolate, berry, mint, and oodles of delectable, flaky pastry. “Morning, Emily,” I called.

  The proprietor smiled from a back table, frosting a few dozen cupcakes with green leaves on their vanilla tops. “Morning, you two. Let me see. Is it a bear claw and a raspberry jam doughnut?”

  “Yes, please,” Jordan said.

  “Oh, and Pippa, I’ve just picked up fresh blueberries from Farmer Frances. You should shoo Hilt up there to pick up a flat or two before they’re all gone. You know how he loves to gossip with her about us youngins.”

  I nodded. “Will do. Thanks, Emily.”

  Jordan and I headed for the Keurig machines along the side wall and picked our favorite K-cups. Jordan picked something different each time without fail so she could better recommend coffee choices to her guests if they asked—and they always asked. Me, I stuck with about two regular choices. That morning, I was definitely in the mood for Emily’s Sumatran Mandheling. We popped our selections in the machines and pressed our buttons simultaneously. As the machines hummed and warmed up, Emily brought over two cute little plates with our morning-break pastry orders and set them on the nearest table.

  A long, significant look seemed to pass between Jordan and Emily, but neither of them said anything. As Jordan and I sat down to enjoy our coffee and doughnuts, I began, “You’ll never believe what happened last night—” But the doorbell jingled, announcing another customer.

  Jordan had sat facing the door, and at the sight of the new arrival, her caramel eyes widened. “Quick, act boring,” she hissed with her eyes still locked on something behind me.

  “What?”

  But she’d already shifted her attention to the man stopping by our table. A man somewhere in the range of ten years older than me with hazel eyes and sandy-blond hair that bore a tall front wave, smiled down at us both from above an exquisitely tailored suit. “Morning, Jordan. Don’t you usually take your morning break at Coffee Breezes? It’s, what, fifty steps from your desk.”

  “I do, Mr. Vanderveer. But my friend had a rough night. You’ve heard about the boat crash against the cliff?”

  I hadn’t even told her the story yet, and I felt more than a little disappointed that she’d heard it from someone other than me. And of course, the newcomer was the robust and driven Mr. Fallon Vanderveer, who’d taken over the hotel during its construction phase because his father died of a sudden heart attack. I’d seen him around town, but we were competitors in the same business, and our scopes were so vastly different that providing vacation housing was literally all we had in common. I nibbled at my bear claw, unsure where the conversation was going.

  Mr. Vanderveer nodded. “Hmm. I think I did hear some murmurings about it before the staff meeting this morning. Mr. French’s death is a loss to our entire community.”

  And your pocketbook. Hotel guests frequently took Cecil’s tour boats out. Or rather, Cecil’s clients frequently stayed at Seven Vistas.

  “It is. But Pippa pulled the only survivor to safety.” Jordan’s voice was oddly loud, as if she was performing on stage.

  The wealthy Mr. Vanderveer’s eyes shifted to me. “Did you now? How invigorating. I bet the fellow’s very grateful to you for his life. How do you enjoy running your little B&B?”

  I kept my smile professional. “It keeps me on my toes. You’d think authors would be a quiet set of guests, but the truth is that most of the time, it’s closer to herding cats.”

  Jordan’s eyes nearly popped out of her head, and I belatedly remembered she’d just told me to be boring. But come on. Absolutely nothing about my life or my job was boring.

  “You know,” I added hastily, “just the usual tourist stuff, but with grammatically correct sentences.”

  Mr. Vanderveer’s face seamed into a lovely map of laugh lines that hadn’t yet become permanently etched in his smooth cheeks. “How delightful! I’ve been running away from my desk job by going BASE jumping, racing jet skis, and diving with sharks, but maybe all I really need is a different customer base. I’m sure I’ll see you around sometime, Pippa. Jordan, catch you in a few.”

  The hotelier ordered a dozen glazed doughnuts and sauntered out into the chilly breeze with his big pink box as if it were a balmy summer day.

  Jordan tsked. “You went and got his attention.” She shook her head pityingly. “I tried to warn you. But you had to go be interesting.”

  “You’re the one who proclaimed me a hero. This is really your fault.” I took a big bite of my bear claw.

  Jordan sighed, took another bite of her jelly doughnut. “I confess. Guilty as charged. But I had an ulterior motive.”

  I sipped my coffee. “Go on.”

  She waved me off. “No, I’ll tell you later. Just remember, Mr. Vanderveer finds smart, independent women irresistible.”

  I smirked at her. “Then why aren’t you dating him?”

  Jordan’s pretty face went full diva with her oh-no-you-di’int look. “Oh, he’s got money, sure, but I work with the man, Pippa. And you know I don’t date at work. Not in this town. Can you imagine the gossip?” Her eyes widened, and she dropped her chin to give me a direct look. “Because I can. Remember Aslyn?”

  I shuddered in sympathy. The local girl had tried to follow in Jordan’s footsteps at the hotel, but six months later, she couldn’t hide her swelling secret anymore, and she and one of the hotel restaurant’s head chefs were summarily let go. Every small town has its own dark side, and Raymond Moore’s mystery-solving legacy made Seacrest the worst town in the world in which to keep a secret.

  Jordan and I chatted for a few minutes around bites of our pastries, and I filled her in on my version of what had happened last night, including accidentally falling asleep in Lake’s arms.

  Her jelly doughnut’s mouth-borne trajectory failed, and it hovered halfway to her lips in shock. “No my God! Shut-up-you-did-not-just-sleep with a perfect stranger!”

  “I did, in fact, just sleep with a perfect stranger. Just. Sleep.”

  She squeed, clicking the tips of her black-cherry nails against the round pink tabletop. “That is so adorable, Pips! Lake Ivens, right? I’ve seen him at Mozzie’s Sandwiches a couple times. Tall, black hair, gorgeous blue eyes, walks with a teensy limp?”

  I hadn’t not
iced a limp, but then the poor guy was recovering from a brush with death. I had been more worried about whether his brains would start leaking out of his ears. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

  “About right? Sounds downright perfect. I know you’ve been as nervous as I am about dating in this postage-stamp town, but this guy’s fresh blood. You’d better snatch him up before anyone else does.”

  “Unless he’s, you know, a cold-blooded murderer. Wrong kind of fresh blood, there, Jordan.”

  She waved away my suggestion. “He’s too cute to kill with anything besides his looks.”

  I squinted at her in mock irritation. “Why don’t you cut out the middle Pippa and just date him yourself?”

  Jordan’s expression swirled from a casual smile to a determined frown. “Nuh-uh. You like him. I can tell. So I won’t even look at him. Girl Code. In fact, I’ll make it my mission to chase all the other girls away for you. I got your back.”

  Heaven is a friend who’s got your back no matter what. “You’re the best best friend ever, Jordan.”

  “Likewise.”

  We polished off the last few crumbs of our food, drained the last drops from our cups, and took our mugs and plates to Emily, who accepted them with a smile.

  “Yums as always, Emily. We’re still on for tonight, right?” I asked.

  She nodded crisply. “Delectable pastries will be delivered to your door at five thirty sharp.” Then she looked to Jordan—again—and seemed to receive some invisible signal. “You know my brother, Roddy,” she said to me.

  I nodded. Roddy Scott ran On The Rocks, a club a couple of blocks away, with his wife, Gwendolyn. Not quite a black sheep in Seacrest—just gray—he’d formed his own niche and opened it up for partying. A handful of my authors had interviewed him for character details, including Paul.