Stormy Day Mysteries 5-Book Cozy Murder Mystery Series Bundle

by Angela Pepper

  Brianna said, in a little-girl voice, “I'm allowed to use the sharp mail opener.”

  “You goofball,” I said, cracking up.

  Quinn gave us a disgusted look. She'd never been a fan of antics.

  “I hope you're both coming to the big party I'm hosting.”

  “Wouldn't miss it for the world,” Brianna said.

  The conversation ground to a halt. Brianna walked away and busied herself with the window display, seemingly having no interest in further conversation with her second-cousin's wife.

  Quinn pursed her lips and looked me up and down. “Speaking of big families, I hear you've been spending time with Samantha Sweet and her family.” She pursed her lips until they were sharp enough to pop balloons. “Who knew Michael Sweet could be housebroken, right?”

  “You know, Quinn, I always thought you two would end up together. You really did make a lovely Homecoming King and Queen.”

  She sighed and got a faraway look in her eyes. “We really did create something wonderful together.” She shifted her attention back to me. “Thank goodness Samantha got him house-trained. He was running around climbing on half the girls in town like it was his job. Even a couple of the Canuso girls.” She raised her eyebrows. “I'm surprised he didn't get himself killed.”

  “There's still time,” I said with a dark chuckle.

  The door chimed with an incoming customer. Thankfully, it wasn't anyone I went to high school with. It was a retired couple, Canadian tourists by the flag pins on the man's fanny pack. The last stragglers of the summer tourism rush.

  They leaned over our sparse candles display, which reminded me, I had candles to order.

  I rearranged the stapler and pens on the counter. “Quinn, I've got some work to do.”

  She made a disappointed sound. “Boo. I wanted to catch up. But I guess you only have time for Danish royalty. It's a shame Countess Whats-her-face had you tied up on my birthday.”

  Ouch. She was the Queen of Passive Aggression.

  I sighed. “If you're still downtown around lunchtime, let's get a bite to eat and catch up.”

  “Maybe,” she said with a yawn. “I've got a bunch of boring housewife errands to run first.”

  I looked her up and down. “Boring housewife errands? You look like you're dressed for something more exciting than that, in your little black dress and your come-get-some heels.”

  She covered her mouth with her hand and giggled. “A girl needs to keep things interesting.”

  The way she said it, I pictured her ambushing her husband Chip somewhere along his route and dragging him into the bushes. It was a startling daydream that was hard to dismiss.

  We said goodbye, she hugged me again, and I watched her leave, walking away in the spiky high heels as easily as some people walk in tennis shoes.

  Later that Monday, at 1:47 p.m., my phone rang. That was when I realized that not only had Quinn not come by to take me out for lunch, but I'd forgotten about eating lunch entirely.

  The incoming number wasn't programmed into my contact list. It came up as PRIVATE CALLER.

  My stomach grumbled. I wanted food, not another distraction. I was tempted to let the call go to voicemail, but I knew it could be an investigation client, and I did need to grow my business. In a town as small as Misty Falls, investigation cases didn't grow on trees.

  I answered with a professional, “This is Stormy Day.”

  There was no response except for heavy breathing.

  “Hello?”

  More heavy breathing.

  I was about to end the call when a trembling female voice came through. “Stormy? It's me. Samantha.”

  I took in a deep breath and steeled myself to deal with another of Samantha's crises of confidence. From the sound of it, she was crying. Again. How could I have made her cry? I'd been safely in my office all day, having no contact with the outside world except for with the wholesales department at our scented-candle supplier.

  “Samantha, tell me what I can do for you,” I said gently.

  “Is Logan there with you?” Her tone sounded robotic and urgent at the same time.

  “No. Logan's not here. I'm at the gift shop. What's wrong, Samantha?”

  “Michael,” she said, and she started to say more, but it broke off into a sob.

  “Did he hit you?” I put together a scenario instantly. “Listen, Samantha. Stay where you are. Tell me your location and I'll be there as soon as I can to pick you up. We can go to the police station and make a report.”

  “What?” More sobbing.

  “Never mind the details. Where are you?”

  She gave me the address. It was the house she was trying to sell, the one we'd been to the open house for on Saturday.

  “Stay right there,” I said. “I'm on my way.”

  I grabbed my purse and ran toward the back door, calling out to Brianna that I was dashing out to help a friend. She yelled back something about the candle order but I kept going. Samantha's phone call had me riled. I'd heard the woman upset before. This was different.

  I drove fast enough to get a speeding ticket—if they'd caught me, which they didn't.

  When I got to the house, I found Samantha Sweet trembling and incoherent.

  Now I understood why she'd sounded so strange on the phone.

  She was covered in blood, yet she had no wounds.

  Chapter 12

  Samantha's white blazer was smeared with blood. Her skirt and legs had only minor transfer stains. I got her to take the ruined blazer off so I could check her for injuries. As I expected, the blood hadn't come from her.

  She didn't say a word to me.

  I put through a second call to Logan, telling his voicemail it was urgent, and then I called 9-1-1.

  Samantha swayed on her feet, as though she could fall over in a strong gust of wind. I led her over to the home's small dining room and sat her on a wooden chair. She folded her bloodied hands neatly on her lap.

  After a minute, she spoke softly, asking me about Logan, muttering, “He's a lawyer, right? I think I need a lawyer. That's what they always tell you.” She continued rambling incoherently.

  I held the phone away from my mouth and told her Logan would be there soon.

  Samantha looked up at me and right through me with an eerie emptiness.

  “Everything's going to be okay,” I told her.

  The woman on the phone asked me to speak up and clarify the nature of my emergency. I gave the dispatcher on the other end of the call as much information as I could, as I ascertained it.

  “There's a woman here, Samantha Sweet, and she's got blood on her clothes, but no injuries that I can see.”

  Samantha's eyes flickered at her name and went blank again. The dispatcher asked more questions.

  “No, she hasn't told me what happened, but I'm looking around now.” I patted Samantha on the shoulder and ventured into the other parts of the house. When I'd arrived, she'd been standing inside the front doorway. I told the dispatcher, “I can see one set of bloody footprints coming down the stairs. The footprints match the shoes that Samantha is wearing. It looks like the source of blood is upstairs.”

  The voice on the line continued, but the words blurred together as though she was speaking another language. I swallowed and closed my eyes, which didn't help. I opened my eyes and found the room was swimming. Time pulled away and stretched out.

  “Yes, the source of the blood is upstairs,” I repeated.

  The dispatcher said more words. I struggled to stay present.

  Upstairs.

  This moment felt so much like the time I'd discovered a con artist dead in her rented home. The self-styled fortune-teller hadn't been able to foresee the future after all. She'd been shot by someone she knew well, with an antique pistol borrowed from the Koenig Estate. I'd stumbled across the scene in her house not long after the incident. Her blood was still warm. And as I walked through her house, the killer may have been watching me.

  Was it hap
pening all over again? No, it couldn't be. The killer had been caught and jailed. Logan still had the scars from the confrontation.

  “Ma'am,” came the voice over the phone line. “Are you still there?”

  “Barely,” I said. “I just realized something. I need to secure the premises.”

  “Ma'am, please stay by the front door to let in the paramedics.”

  “I left the door open,” I said.

  She protested my plan, suggesting instead I go outside and wait on the sidewalk with neighbors, but I ignored her. I headed up the stairs, stepping along the side of the staircase to avoid treading through Samantha's bloody shoe prints.

  I tucked the phone into my pocket without switching it off. I slowly opened my purse and pulled out some personal self-defense items. I'd gotten in the habit of being over-prepared, with more goodies than hands. I selected my top two picks from my EDC. First there was the kubotan, also known as a ninja spike, that connected to my keychain. Second, and relatively new to my kit, was the monkey ball, a steel ball bearing wrapped in a cord.

  They say the safest fight is the one you run away from. I had every intention of running if someone scary jumped out at me, but I could still run with a kubotan in my hand. I carefully wrapped my fingers around the base of the spiky object some people referred to as the “attitude adjuster.” I'd only practiced striking a dummy, but the concept was simple: introduce the pointy end to something bony, fleshy, or sensitive.

  Feeling just a teensy bit like a ninja, I reached the upper floor.

  “Hello,” I called out. “The police are on their way now.”

  I held steady, listening for signs of movement.

  The upper part of the house was still. It felt empty, yet not empty.

  The air was moist.

  A tap was dripping.

  I could hear Samantha downstairs, still rambling semi-coherently to herself. I wanted to sit beside her and be a source of comfort, but there'd be no comfort if an assailant was still in the home.

  I checked the first bedroom, where I'd seen Samantha talking with Colt two days earlier. Empty.

  Second bedroom. Empty.

  The lack of closets made the home a tough sell with home buyers, but it did speed up my search.

  In the silence, a small, tinny voice called out. “Ma'am?”

  I wheeled around, ready to stab with my ninja stick, strike with my monkey balls, or run.

  There was nobody behind me.

  “Ma'am? Are you still there?”

  As my heart rate settled down, I realized the tinny voice was the 9-1-1 dispatcher trying to talk to me on the phone, which I'd put on speaker mode.

  “I'm still here,” I said loudly. “Just have to check the bathroom. That's the room with the bloody footprints leaving it.” I cursed under my breath. “And the door is closed. Of course.”

  The dispatcher said, “Ma'am, did you say bloody footprints? Ma'am, do not go into that room.”

  “The footprints are coming out,” I said. “Someone might be hurt in there.”

  “Are they calling out for assistance?”

  “No.”

  “Ma'am, you should go wait outside, with a neighbor.” After some heavy breathing, she broke away from her script. “Lady, you need to get outta that house! Use your head, girl! If I walk in some place and see bloody footprints, I'm gonna bust my way out, not keep goin' in!”

  “Well, I'm here already,” I said bravely.

  I pulled a fresh handkerchief from my purse and delicately turned the door handle

  I kicked the door open with my toe and then took a few steps back. If someone had been trapped in the room and wanted to escape, they could do it right past me rather than through me.

  Nobody ran out.

  The only sound was water dripping.

  I steadied myself and looked in.

  There was a man lying in the tub, staring lifelessly back at me.

  Michael Sweet.

  Someone had stabbed him.

  Someone had stabbed him a whole bunch of times.

  Chapter 13

  “Stormy Day, don't talk to me like I'm a bonehead. You know a heck of a lot more than you're saying.”

  Officer Peggy Wiggles gave me one of her no-nonsense looks, her cobalt-blue eyes piercing into me.

  I tore my gaze away and looked out the passenger-side window. We were sitting in her police car, parked in front of the house where I'd discovered Michael Sweet's body an hour earlier. The whole team had swarmed the house. Crime scene investigators had fastened yellow crime-scene tape to the base of the home's For Sale sign and encircled the yard.

  “Taping off the yard seems excessive,” I said. “Poor Samantha will never be able to sell this house.”

  “She should have considered that before she killed her husband.”

  I whipped my head around to face the officer. Peggy Wiggles looked as serious as her name was playful. The woman was in her early fifties, and she was a rookie cop—as new to the badge as she was to the town of Misty Falls, but she brought with her a wealth of life experience. She and I sported the same sensible short haircut, though hers had blond highlights mixed with gray. Her angular face shape was rarely softened with a smile, except when she was talking about her cat. That Monday afternoon, she was not in the mood to talk about her cat.

  “Samantha wouldn't hurt a fly,” I said. “Or even a spider. I've seen her use a sheet of paper to pick up a spider and take it outside.”

  “Did a spider give her that bruise on her eye?”

  I answered her question with a question. “Have there been reports of domestic violence?”

  “You tell me,” she returned coolly.

  I glanced out the passenger window again, watching the crime scene investigators perform a grid search of the home's entryway.

  “I can tell you Samantha didn't kill her husband.”

  “Oh? How can you be so certain? Did you volunteer to kill him for her?”

  I whipped my head back again. There was a trace of amusement in her piercing cobalt-blue eyes. She might not enjoy having another homicide in town, but she was getting a kick out of rattling my chain. It was the kind of dark-humored ribbing that police officers gave each other. I decided to take her accusation as a compliment. Back in February, I'd served as her right hand at the Flying Squirrel Resort, when the mountain pass had been blocked by a snowstorm.

  “Hang on,” Officer Wiggles said. “If you're going to confess to being a hit woman, I should probably write something down.” She held her finger in the air while she pulled out a notepad and pen with her other hand. “Now, how much did she pay you?”

  “Very funny,” I said. “It's good to see that working under Tony Baloney hasn't destroyed your sense of humor yet.”

  “He tries,” she said plainly. “Now, what makes you so sure Samantha didn't snap and kill her husband?”

  “The smell of bleach,” I said.

  “I'm listening. Tell me more about the bleach.”

  “I didn't notice it at first. You know how panic shuts off some of your senses. It wasn't until I heard the sirens that I smelled the bleach. I found the home's washing machine, which is in a closet on the main level, and I very carefully opened it, using the edge of the lid plus my handkerchief.”

  She shook her head. “You can't go tampering with a crime scene like that.”

  “Fine. Get people in this town to stop killing each other and I'll stop touching things in crime scenes.”

  She waved her hand impatiently. “Go on.”

  “The owners of the house are out of town, but there was a wet load of laundry in the machine. The load had finished a thirty-minute cycle before I arrived, but it was still wet. It reeked of bleach, and the only thing in the load appeared to be men's clothes. A shirt, a pair of jeans, socks, and underwear. The killer tried to destroy evidence by washing everything.”

  “We don't know that,” Wiggles said. “Michael could have tossed his clothes in the wash before he took a shower.
”

  “Don't be sexist,” I said with a twisted smile. “Even a man as dumb as Michael would know not to put a bunch of bleach in with dark clothes. I didn't pull the jeans out, but I bet they were ruined.”

  “And the bleach did a good job of removing evidence,” she said with a sigh.

  “We're looking for a scary, cool-headed killer.”

  “Cool as a cucumber.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Which completely rules out poor Samantha. She's a blubbering mess. She wouldn't have had the presence of mind to put in a load of laundry and then get blood all over her hands and call me. Not unless she was a devious criminal mastermind. She's a hard worker, but she's no mastermind.”

  “They never are,” she said flatly. “I'm sure your thoughtful testimony of Mrs. Sweet's innocence has nothing to do with her being a friend of yours. I'll just make a note in my book here that we shouldn't bother looking into her alibi or motives, since you vouch for her.”

  “I'm just trying to help.”

  “If you really wanted to help, you'd tell me who killed the guy. Who hated Michael Sweet enough to stab him in the chest and neck twenty-three times?”

  “Twenty-three stabs?”

  “Plus a few slashes.” She paused to wave at Captain Tony Milano, who was staring at us through the windshield. He nodded back, pointed his finger at me accusingly, and walked away.

  Officer Wiggles shifted in the driver's seat, her utility belt and equipment squeaking with her movements. She watched and waited for Tony to disappear into the house before she spoke again.

  “Stormy, I do have your discretion, right? This information I'm providing is not for public consumption. We'll keep these details out of the news.”

  “I counted twenty-five stabs.”

  “Of course you did.” She sighed. “Well, we're done here. I trust you'll give me a call when you're ready to ambush the killer with one of your devious little whodunit schemes. You can take all the glory and leave us dumb cops scrambling to get some real evidence that the district attorney won't throw out while laughing hysterically.”

  “Nope,” I said. “This has nothing to do with me.” I summoned up a phrase I'd been repeating to myself recently as a mantra. “If I'm not getting paid, it's not my case, and if it's not my case, it's not my business.”