Stormy Day Mysteries 5-Book Cozy Murder Mystery Series Bundle

by Angela Pepper

“No ghosts?

  He snorted. “You should have a certified electrician come in and upgrade the whole panel, but I don't think there's any rush.” He stood in the doorway to the den, his face in shadow.

  I finished sweeping up and stood with the flashlight under my chin, pointing up.

  “Chet, you were going to tell me how Ms. Vander Zalm passed. Specifically, whether or not it was inside this house.”

  He crossed his arms and leaned casually against the door frame as he chuckled. “Is it that time of the night already?”

  “Do you mean the time of night where we tell spooky stories?”

  He kept chuckling.

  “I do know quite a few spooky tales,” I said. “It's one of the hazards of my career.”

  “Hmm.” He rubbed his chin. “Let me guess. You're a camp counselor?”

  “Close but no prize.” I pulled the flashlight away and blinked at the blurry splotches in my field of view.

  Through the haze, I could see his shadowy outline nodding. “Let's leave the ghost stories to our kids,” he said. “As for Ms. Vander Zalm, she passed away peacefully in her sleep.”

  “Here? In the house?”

  “I did say peacefully. Can you imagine anything more peaceful than passing into the next world from the comfort of your own home?”

  I crossed my arms and sighed. “Chet, I like how you don't give straight answers. I'm sure it drives some people crazy, but I dig it. You're interesting.”

  “Are you being sarcastic?”

  “Let's leave that open to your interpretation.”

  “Zara Riddle, you are so much more than Zara the Camgirl.”

  “I'm also a librarian.”

  “Not a camp counselor?”

  “Nope. I'm one of Wisteria's librarians. Starting Monday.”

  “Tell me more about this librarian job of yours,” he said.

  “Oh, I will,” I said. “Let's get some of that pizza before I faint, though.”

  We found the pizza in the dining room and put a few slices onto plates, which we took to the half-unpacked living room. I resisted the urge to mash the food into my face double handed. I didn't want Chet to see my monster side just yet.

  Chet took a seat on an upholstered chair and spread two squares of paper towel across his lap. He had another two squares he was using as napkins, and he took careful bites of his pizza slice, holding the plate up under it to catch crumbs.

  He held himself up with excellent posture. I started to feel self-conscious about my slouched position on the sofa. I got the feeling the Moore house next door had a lot of rules about where eating happened, and it didn't happen in the living room.

  The two kids darted in and out while they explored the house together, chatting away about science facts, oscillating between becoming sworn nemeses and the best of friends.

  Corvin seemed very comfortable inside my house—the opposite of his father. Chet had been warm and polite about checking the electrical panel and answering my nosy questions about his former neighbor, but from the minute he'd taken a seat, he'd looked uncomfortable.

  A peal of laughter floated down from the upper floor.

  “I'm glad they're getting along,” Chet said.

  “How old is Corvin?”

  Chet winced, looking even more uncomfortable. I started to wonder if there was something wrong with the chair, or with his back. He adjusted the tiny throw pillow on the chair behind him. “Let's say he's ten, give or take a month.”

  I laughed at his vagueness. “Those two may be six years apart, but Zoey has the same sense of humor as a ten-year-old boy, so they're not as different as they appear.” I didn't add that I also laughed at puerile humor and butt jokes. As my neighbor, Chet would figure that out soon enough.

  Chet took a sip of lime cordial from his martini glass and asked, “What does it take to be a librarian?”

  I started listing off the requirements on my fingers. “A corkscrew for the wine, a closet full of cardigans, the optimism to assume that all brown mystery stains found in books are chocolate, a desk calendar featuring cats in hilarious costumes, and, um, did I mention the cardigans? Sometimes you need to wear a cardigan over top of your other cardigan if the library is really cold or you spilled wine on yourself.”

  He smiled, and it was a smile that radiated beams of light into the darkest reaches of my heart. My joke seemed to have relaxed him a little. I looked away quickly, before I started blushing, but it was too late. My cheeks were hot.

  I took a bite of pizza and then answered his question more seriously, telling him about the education I'd taken to qualify for a librarian job.

  “That's a lot of schooling,” he said. I expected him to finish the thought with, to do what the internet does for free. Bless his heart, he didn't say it. Could he be any more charming?

  “I did put in a lot of long hours,” I said. “During the times I was tempted to give up, I pushed on so I could set a good example for Zoey.”

  He raised his eyebrows in a look of admiration. “And you did it all while raising your daughter as a single parent.” He jerked his head back, frowned, and quickly added, “Oops. I didn't mean to say that. I hate it when people call me a single parent. Labels are so stigmatizing.”

  “Labels really are the worst,” I agreed. “I wasn't thinking ahead about the label when I got pregnant.” I stood up and refilled our glasses with green cordial. “I wasn't thinking at all,” I said.

  Chet gave me a sly look. “Thinking is overrated. Life is for living.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “And even if I could go back in time and confiscate those Barberrian wine coolers from the younger version of myself before I got in trouble, I wouldn't change a thing.”

  Chet picked up his martini glass and raised it in a toast. “To not changing a thing.”

  I raised mine as well and clinked it against his glass. After a moment, I mused, “I wish I could still get those wine coolers, but the company went out of business.”

  “What a shame,” he said, his eyes twinkling.

  While the kids ran around the house, exploring the attic and all the crawlspace storage cubbies, Chet and I continued our chat in the living room.

  His posture remained rigid, and he continued to give off the aura of waiting to escape, but I found him to be a wonderful conversationalist. When I talked, he really listened, and the words flowed. It probably helped that I was so complimentary of his hometown.

  I told him how excited I was to be working my dream job in a town that felt like an undiscovered gem. How did Wisteria even exist? The town had just enough of everything, was as pretty as a postcard, and my dream house was totally affordable. How had the rest of the world not packed up their bags and moved there ahead of me?

  Chet didn't have any answers but agreed that Wisteria had to be paradise because people kept telling him that. He'd grown up here, so he knew little else.

  I tried to find out more about him, but he kept skillfully redirecting the conversation back to me, and heaven knows I do love a captive audience.

  We joked around about ghosts and werewolves and things that go bump in the night.

  After we'd finished all the pizza, Corvin and Zoey ran next door and returned with fresh brownies and vanilla ice cream. We invited Grampa Don, but he declined, as he was watching something on TV.

  I was so cozy. My body felt like an al dente noodle. I relaxed into the corner of the sofa and reached for my favorite patchwork quilt to draw across my lap.

  Chet was talking to Zoey about her aspirations beyond high school and then…

  A clock began striking midnight with loud gongs.

  I said, “What was that?” We didn't own a clock that made gong sounds.

  The gonging continued, ringing in my head.

  Chet and Zoey continued to talk about careers, as though they couldn't hear the thunderous clangs of the clock striking the time.

  I tried to speak again, but I was frozen, as if in a dream.

  The room s
himmered and wavered around me.

  Was I dreaming? Was any of this real? It did feel too good to be true.

  My eyes felt like they were burning.

  I was falling down a tunnel that was both dark and bright at the same time, a swirling rainbow of starbursts. The gongs of the clock turned to thunder, cracking around me. The world tipped sideways, and I lurched to a stop.

  Everything was dark.

  Chapter 6

  Where am I?

  I opened my eyes. My environment was still dark, but things started taking shape, looking more familiar.

  What happened?

  I'd been sitting on the couch, across from Chet, thinking about taking the last brownie in the pan. Then a clock had started gonging at midnight.

  Midnight?

  Something had changed. Today was Zoey's birthday. My daughter was sixteen.

  But something else had happened, and now I wasn't in the living room anymore.

  I was alone, in a kitchen. My kitchen.

  The room's lights were off, but enough ambient light came in from the street lamps that I could dimly make out my surroundings. How did I get to the kitchen? And why was I wearing my black sleeping dress again? I must have fallen asleep in the living room. How embarrassing. My daughter must have helped me get undressed and changed into the nightgown.

  And now I was in the kitchen. Was I sleepwalking? That was a new one for me.

  A burning smell made my sinuses ache and my eyes water.

  Something in front of me was glowing red. Two rectangular lines. The toaster.

  KERCLUNK.

  The toaster's handle popped up, along with two pieces of blackened toast. The toast was beyond edible, practically ashes.

  I yanked the charred toast from the still-glowing appliance and tossed both pieces in the nearby sink. The blackened squares continued to smolder. I quickly doused them with water to stop tendrils of smoke from reaching the room's smoke detector.

  Think, Zara. What's the last thing you remember? Feeling drowsy on the sofa. Chet's green eyes watching me as he sat straight-backed in the chair. The familiar comfort of being near him. Being completely relaxed.

  And then I must have fallen asleep right in front of the poor guy. How rude. But he'd probably be understanding. I had spent the day moving.

  When I'd heard the gonging on the clock at midnight, it could have been an auditory hallucination brought on by exhaustion or even the beginning of a dream.

  My tiredness explained my patchy memory but not sleepwalking, let alone this new phenomenon of sleeptoasting.

  I chuckled to myself as I wrung the water out of the black toast, tossed the soppy remains into the food compost bucket under the sink, and poured myself a glass of water. Dehydration makes people do funny things.

  I checked the time on the stove. It was three o'clock in the morning.

  Today was Sunday, Zoey's birthday. I yawned. I had to get some more sleep before taking her shopping to get new bedroom stuff for her sixteenth birthday.

  She'd laugh her butt off when she heard about my sleeptoasting.

  Actually, I'd never hear the end of it. Maybe I wouldn't tell her about this incident.

  It was probably just a one-time event, nothing to be concerned about.

  I turned to leave the kitchen and accidentally dropped the water glass I'd forgotten I was holding. The glass headed straight for the floor, right between my bare toes. My breath caught in my throat, and time stood still.

  No, really.

  Time stood still.

  Not like a car accident, when something scary is happening quickly and your mind speeds up to make it seem like everything's moving in slow motion.

  Time truly stood still, and the glass paused in its descent, floating about three inches from the floor.

  I leaned forward to see what the glass had caught on. Was it a trick of the light, a bump in the flooring? I blinked, and time seemed to flow again. The glass dropped the rest of the way and landed on the floor with a soft ringing sound.

  I picked up the glass and examined it. There was nothing unusual about the glass except that it had hung in midair for a second.

  As if by magic.

  I snorted at my wild imagination, put the glass back on the counter, and went back upstairs to bed.

  In the morning, I chuckled to myself over the previous night's sleeptoasting. I knew I hadn't dreamed the incident, because the charred toast remains were still sitting in the compost bucket under the sink.

  I made a pot of coffee and fresh, noncharred toast for breakfast.

  At ten o'clock, I went upstairs to get Zoey up and found her bed empty and neatly made. I raced around the house, checking all the rooms and calling her name. She was sixteen and able to take care of herself, but we were in a new town, and I couldn't help but get those motherly worries.

  I eventually found her in the backyard, reclining on a weathered lawn chair, soaking up some morning sunshine with her eyes closed and an open paperback resting on her chest. Like me, she had pale skin to go with her red hair, and so sunbathing was limited to the spring and fall months only.

  “Happy birthday, Sleeping Beauty,” I said.

  Her eyelids fluttered open, and she sat up. Except for the rusty lawn chair that squeaked with her movement, she could have been a slumbering princess from a fairy tale. My chest ached with love, as it always did whenever I saw my daughter immediately following a bout of motherly worrying.

  I took a seat on a wooden stump next to her chair. “Do you feel any older?”

  “I think I feel different,” she said as she rubbed her eyes. “But I can't tell if it's from turning sixteen or if it's from waking up in a new place. I was so disoriented this morning. I thought I was going into the bathroom, but I opened the door and it was a linen closet. I spent a whole minute being mad at you, because I thought you switched things around to play a joke on me. But then I found the actual bathroom, so you're forgiven.”

  I laughed. “As much as I love pranks, I have neither the magical powers nor the team of construction workers required to swap rooms around willy nilly.”

  She reached for the mug of coffee in my hands. “For me?”

  “Sure.” I handed it over. “Happy birthday. I'll just go get another one for myself.”

  I went back into the house and poured myself a cup. My daughter had been drinking coffee for the last year. Sometimes other mothers would give me disapproving looks while ordering sugary cocoa for their children. I allowed Zoey to drink coffee as long as she avoided the heavy syrups and kept it to a reasonable quantity. As far as vices went, her caffeine habit was mild. I hoped she would continue to be such a smart, thoughtful teenager now that she was another year older. I knew the risks of small-town life for teens. On one hand, it could be safer, because people knew each other and were more community oriented. But on the other hand, some small towns were lacking in activities for teens, which left kids with little choice but to find their own amusement.

  Only time would tell what kind of life Zoey would build for herself in Wisteria. She had been a well-liked student at her former high school, but it hadn't happened overnight. She'd grown up with most of the girls in her small circle. I did worry about her sometimes, because she was content to spend her weekends with her nose in a book. It could take months for her to come out of her introvert shell and make friends. I smiled at the memory of her chasing Corvin around the house the night before. At least she had one new buddy, a pseudo-brother.

  Mug in hand, I stepped out into the backyard once more.

  “This is amazing,” I said to Zoey. “Am I dreaming? We have an entire backyard that belongs to us. This is so much better than a tiny, rusted fire escape looking out over an alley, don't you think?”

  She'd gotten up from the old lawn chair and was digging around under the stalks of some overgrown vines. “It's like a jungle back here,” she said.

  “But a real jungle. Not a concrete jungle.” I looked around at the shrubbery and t
rees and flowers that were all mine, mine, mine. I'd dreamed for so long of having a yard of my own that I relished the idea of toiling away back there, planting and pruning things.

  “That's weird,” Zoey said, pulling something from the dirt. “These little rocks aren't rocks at all.”

  “They could be bulbs for daffodils or tulips that finished blooming a couple months ago.”

  “No. Bulbs look like tiny onions, and these are rocks that look exactly like... Well, you tell me.”

  She plopped three gray stones into my palm. They looked like concrete hornets, right down to the detail of wings folded against their backs.

  “These are weird,” I agreed. “Mrs. Vander Zalm must have had eclectic taste when it came to garden ornaments.” I handed back the three pebble-sized ornaments as I glanced around at the shadows between the fence and the overgrown shrubs. “Keep an eye out for garden gnomes. They sneak up on you when you're not looking.”

  “Very funny.” Zoey scooped a handful of water from a concrete bird bath and rinsed off the concrete hornets. “These are incredibly detailed,” she said.

  “You look like you're enjoying yourself. Do you want to spend the day poking around in the garden, or do you want to hit the shops?”

  “Shopping,” she said. “I don't really need anything, but we should explore our new town.”

  She set the curious little hornets back on the ground where she'd found them.

  Chapter 7

  We were walking along one of the quaint shopping streets of Wisteria when Zoey said to me, “What's the name of that show where some of the people are robots?”

  “Do you mean Westworld?”

  “Not that one.”

  “Robocop? The Terminator? Blade Runner? Aliens?”

  “The one with pretty robots,” she said.

  “Like the fembots in Austin Powers? Or do you mean pretty like Jude Law in A.I.?”

  She stopped walking and raised her red eyebrows at me. “Wow. You're really good at the whole librarian thing.”

  “So good, it never shuts off. Just call me Walking Wikipedia. People used to say 'walking encyclopedia,' but I'm still young and hip, so I've updated the expression to be more current.” I gestured for her to step over so we weren't blocking the sidewalk. “Now tell me more about this show you're thinking of.”