Stormy Day Mysteries 5-Book Cozy Murder Mystery Series Bundle

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Stormy Day Mysteries 5-Book Cozy Murder Mystery Series Bundle Page 126

by Angela Pepper


  She rubbed her chin and scrunched her forehead. “The remake has Ferris Bueller in it.”

  I snapped my fingers. “You mean Mathew Broderick, and the movie is Stepford Wives.” I fist pumped the air in a most un–librarian-like gesture. “Nailed it!”

  She gave me a patronizing pat on the shoulder. “Very good.” She gestured for us to start walking again. “I was trying to think of the name of that movie, because I'm noticing something unusual about the people who live in this town.”

  I looked around, trying to see what she did. All I saw were regular people up and down the sidewalks, carrying shopping bags or walking dogs and stopping to say hello to each other.

  “Zoey, I don't see anything wrong with these folks.”

  “Exactly.” She glanced over to give me a knowing smile. “They're all perfect. Like extras in a movie about a quaint small town with a dark secret.”

  “Like Wayward Pines,” I said. “Or any number of Stephen King adaptations.”

  “Exactly. Do you think it's the town, or do you think it's just me? Did growing up in a big city warp my mind somehow?” We'd both slowed our walking again, and she stopped to gaze at our reflections in a store window.

  Now it was my turn to pat her on the shoulder. “Oh, sweetie. You are warped, but not from—”

  We were interrupted by a person approaching and lightly touching my elbow. I turned quickly to find a very small man with a big, round nose staring up at me with tiny dark eyes. He had a pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses in one hand.

  “And a very good morning to you, Ms. Riddle,” the gnome-like man said.

  “Same to you,” I said politely, even though I had no idea who the small fellow was. If I'd ever met someone who looked exactly like an adorable garden gnome, I would have remembered the face.

  He kept squinting up at me, waving the glasses in his hand as he spoke. “And who's this lovely redhead accompanying you this fine morning? Is this your niece?”

  “My daughter,” I said. “Zoey, this is...” I turned to the man, expecting him to give his name.

  The small man laughed. “Such a joker, you are!” He passed his glasses to his other hand and extended his right hand to Zoey. “Lovely to meet you, miss. I'm Griebel.”

  “Griebel,” Zoey repeated, giving me a raised eyebrow as she leaned down and shook his hand. “And how do you two know each other?”

  The big-nosed man let out a merry laugh. “Oh, this one”—he nodded in my direction—”and I go way back.” Griebel pulled a crisp handkerchief from his pocket and turned to walk away, cleaning his glasses as he went. “Toodles,” he called over his shoulder.

  Once he was out of hearing range, I whispered to Zoey, “I have no idea who that was.”

  “He must really need those glasses if he thought you were someone else.”

  “Someone who's also called Ms. Riddle?” I shook my head. “Weirdly enough, the little guy did seem familiar. I must have met him before and forgotten.”

  “Does he work at the library? Maybe he was there at your interview.”

  “No, but weirdly enough, I do have a faint recollection of giving him an autographed book of recipes.”

  “A book? Well, that explains it,” Zoey said. “You must have met him at a librarian function or a book signing.”

  “Sure,” I said. “That seems a lot more logical than your theory that this town is populated by humanoid robots.”

  “Or that there's a giant conspiracy and everyone here is a paid actor, like in The Truman Show.”

  “Ooh.” I looked around at the colorful storefronts, clean city streets, and orderly flow of smiling townspeople. “This town does have a Truman Show vibe. Maybe we should move back to the city right away? It will be so much fun to put all the things we just unpacked back into cardboard boxes again.”

  “Hmm,” Zoey said. “Let's not be hasty.”

  “Admit it. You love Wisteria.”

  She frowned. “Undecided. Let's go across the street to that appliance repair shop and see if they have a nice lamp for my bedroom.”

  We went to the crosswalk, and the cars in both directions immediately stopped and waved us across, both drivers smiling.

  Zoey was right about one thing. There was definitely something unusual about the whole town.

  At least I'd be starting at my new job the next morning. My fellow librarians would be able to let me in on the many secrets of Wisteria.

  Chapter 8

  An Old English word for library is bochord, which literally means “book hoard.”

  Given the size of the town, the Wisteria Public Library was a very well-stocked bochard. The library crouched on a downtown corner, low and squat, like a slumbering dragon made of concrete. It had been built in the brutalist style, during an era when municipal buildings seemingly erupted from the ground, raw in material and devoid of frivolity. The only color was the slate blue of the doors. There were windows on the lower floor only, and they were deep set within the folds of the concrete walls.

  I'd had low expectations from the exterior but was dazzled to find the interior of the library surprisingly bright, thanks to a grid of skylights and a lofted central area.

  When I'd visited the month before for my interview, I'd taken one look around and instantly known it was the place for me. A book hoard inside a bunker. From the sensible layout to the gorgeous, double-height shelves with rolling ladders for staff to access the closed stacks, this was the library I'd been longing to call home.

  Call it love at first sight. And I was pretty sure the Wisteria library loved me back.

  My new boss, however, wasn't too sure about me.

  I was nervous on my first day at my job, and the head librarian, Kathy Carmichael, wasn't giving me much feedback.

  Two hours into my Monday shift, we walked together into the staff lounge in the northwest corner of the library. We were supposed to be taking a coffee break, but the head librarian kept remembering more important things she needed to tell me.

  “Oh, you'll need to get on rotation for FPF,” Kathy said.

  “That sounds serious.” It was also, surprisingly, a term I didn't know.

  Kathy had spent the morning drilling me on the library's computer system and more three-letter acronyms than a person typically hears in a single day. The Wisteria Public Library (WPL) used an open-source, web-based integrated library system (ILS) to manage acquisitions, and a geographic information system (GIS) to map the physical layout of everything.

  Kathy looked at me with pinched lips, silent for a moment, as though she wasn't sure if I could handle the shocking revelation of whatever FPF was and what it meant to be on rotation for it.

  “Whooooo am I kidding,” she said, drawing out the word who so it sounded like she was hooting. “This is a lot of acronyms I'm hitting you with. We should take a break.” Her small eyes darted toward the box of leftover birthday cake near the staff lounge's sink.

  I nodded and gave Kathy my serious face. “There are a lot of acronyms, boss, but I've worked at libraries before, as a page and also an assistant. I can handle it.” Plus I really wanted to know what FPF meant. The P could easily stand for patron, which is what libraries call the people who patronize the institution, rather than customer or client or muggle.

  She didn't hear me, though. I'd lost the head librarian to the box of birthday cake. She loaded a sturdy square onto a plate and took a bite.

  “Stale,” she commented. She kept eating anyway.

  I wasn't too eager for stale cake, plus I wanted my new boss to like me, so I took a square and joined her. “Not bad,” I said.

  “It's from the Gingerbread House of Baking,” she said. “Have you been there yet? Oh, you have to go. Their recipes are simply magical.”

  “I promise to go,” I said solemnly.

  With each bite of cake, the color returned to Kathy's pale cheeks. The woman was in her forties, with medium-brown hair falling in curls, light-brown eyes that glowed golden orange under the bright
lights, and an oval face with high cheeks that nudged her glasses whenever she got animated and talked faster. The lenses of her glasses were perfect circles, framed in gold with delicate filigree around the hinge connecting the arms. The round glasses gave her an owl-like appearance, and I noticed she drew out the word who, so it sounded like she was hooting. And she loved rhetorical questions. Already that morning, she'd said, “Whooooo can resist a book with a dog on the cover?” as well as, “Whooooo doesn't love a trashy beach read on vacation?”

  We ate our cake in silence.

  She kept looking at me as though she expected something shocking to happen, like for me to reach into my purse and reveal the cat I'd brought with me to work. Then again, given what I knew about my fellow librarians back home, a cat in the purse wouldn't exactly be shocking. Two cats would raise an eyebrow.

  The cake didn't have any flavor in my mouth, but I chalked it up to nerves. I hoped Kathy Carmichael liked me, but she seemed guarded, unsure about something.

  She gave me a tight smile as she carved off another slice of cake.

  “Zara, do you have any hobbies? Are you into crafting?”

  “Not really,” I answered honestly, and as soon as the words were out, I knew I'd made a mistake. She'd asked me because she liked crafting. Now what could I do? “I like costumes,” I said.

  “You sew?”

  As much as it could potentially help my career, I couldn't lie. “No. I just buy costumes when theater companies sell off their excess.”

  “Hmm,” she said.

  “Are you a crafter?”

  Her orange-brown eyes brightened, but she'd just taken a huge bite of cake and couldn't speak.

  I decided to go out on a limb and regale her with something personal.

  “The strangest thing happened to me last night,” I said, and I recounted my unusual nighttime activity.

  When I finished the anecdote, Kathy stared at me like I was a talking raccoon. As the head librarian as well as the director, she was the one who'd interviewed me and hired me the previous month. Now she looked like she was having some regrets.

  “Sleeptoasting?” Kathy pushed her round glasses up her pointed nose and scrutinized me with owlish blinks.

  “Never mind,” I said with a hand wave. “I'm sure last night's sleeptoasting was just a one-time thing, like making a soufflé. Everyone has to try it once to figure out it's not for them. After all, a soufflé is just a weirdly eggy cake with a bunch of hot air inside.”

  “Soufflé is overrated,” Kathy agreed, smiling. An image came to my head of Kathy in a kitchen, proudly offering someone a wedge of her prized quiche.

  I didn't know where the idea had come from, but I ran with it. “But you know what's not overrated? Quiche.”

  Her orange-brown eyes widened behind her round glasses, and she hooted, “Whoooo doesn't love quiche?”

  I got a mental image of a box of recipes. “I'm on the hunt for a great quiche recipe,” I said, which was a string of words I'd never expected to hear coming from my mouth. I've never been a fan of cooking by the rules, or cooking at all. Recipes, I've often joked, were for the olden days, before the invention of takeout menus.

  Kathy grabbed a pen and note card from a nearby stack and began hastily writing something out. Her handwriting matched her appearance. Her Vs were small and pointy like her nose, and her Os were perfectly round like her glasses.

  “You'll love my recipe for asparagus and crispy bacon quiche,” she said.

  I took the note card and held it to my chest. “Thank you so much,” I said. “Now, are you going to tell me what FPF stands for?”

  She glanced over at the remaining cake. “Fresh Pastry Friday,” she said with a sigh. “It's also the day we clean out the fridge.”

  “Put me on the rotation for this week,” I said.

  She gave me a blank look. “So, you're staying?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Why wouldn't I be staying? Don't tell me you guys have a trap door here, leading to a dungeon where you dispose of new librarians who don't fit in.”

  Her blank look became one of puzzlement. “Trap door?”

  “Never mind.” I gave her a big smile. “Break time's over. Back to acronyms. Tell me more about your WSC and ILL.”

  Kathy continued to train me throughout the morning.

  The library's procedures were not atypical, but the place did have some interesting quirks.

  One unusual thing in particular was the Grumpy Corner. This was a darkened corner of the staff lounge that was outfitted with beanbag chairs, big pillows, and two space heaters for winter use. Any member of staff could go there to chill at any time, even outside of official breaks, without judgment.

  “That's a really good idea,” I said when Kathy showed me the Grumpy Corner.

  “Isn't it, though? I love being a librarian, but, well, you know.”

  I agreed completely. Being a librarian is a wonderful job, but like all careers, it comes with specific stresses. Patrons expect you to have all the answers, and sometimes you don't. When one thing goes wrong, it can become a cascade. A patron complaining about the homeless gentleman snoring in the science fiction section can lead to tension that aggravates the RSI earned from hours of repetitive book shelving. And then there's the local Conspiracy Guy, the students who expect you to do their homework for them, and the people who hand you their phone because they can't understand the accent of the person they've reached at customer service for their online banking.

  At lunchtime, Kathy forced me to go on my break. I wanted to keep learning more, but she insisted I take my mandatory meal break.

  Alone in the staff lounge, I nibbled through my lunch while jotting down a to-do list for home. I wrote finish unpacking. That didn't feel very inspiring, so I wrote underneath it, buy new boots to celebrate being unpacked. Then, upon further consideration, I crossed out everything except buy new boots.

  I finished my list and still had a few minutes left, so I looked around for a way to make myself useful. Kathy had mentioned that a fridge clean-out happened on Fridays, so I got a head start on things. I opened the staff fridge and removed all the plastic containers holding moldy leftovers and mystery mush, chucked the food into the compost bin, and gave all the containers a good scrub with hot, soapy water.

  I dried my hands and ran out to the circ desk to relieve Kathy for her own break.

  She returned a few minutes later, clutched my arm with her cold hand, and whispered, “Who threw out my lunch? Whoooo?” Her golden-orange, owl-like eyes blinked behind her round glasses.

  “Who?” I winced and thumbed my chest. “That would be me. But I swear I only tossed out the old stuff that looked gross.”

  “You threw out my acorn jelly?” Her voice cracked like she was on the verge of crying.

  “Was it a brown, gelatinous sludge?”

  Kathy nodded and sniffed. “It's called dotori muk. My Korean neighbor made it for me.”

  “Does your neighbor not like you very much?” I grinned, waiting for her laugh, but it never came.

  “Who would throw out someone's lunch? And then joke about it? Did Vinnie put you up to this? I should have known better.”

  I didn't know who Vinnie was, but didn't ask her to clarify. I hung my head. “It was all my idea. Just me. I'm so sorry, boss. I'll run out now and buy you a whole new lunch. What do you want? Sushi? Pizza? Let me make it up to you.” I gazed at her with my most repentant expression.

  “Never mind,” she said softly, turning away. “You have a patron waiting at circ.”

  She was right. A woman stood at the counter, impatiently tapping her library card on the top of a stack of books. Card tapping was the height of passive aggressiveness in a library, but maybe I deserved it.

  I checked out the patron's books, and when I was done with her, I popped my head into the staff lounge.

  Kathy was sitting in the Grumpy Corner with a blanket over her face.

  My heart sank.

  So much for
my first day.

  My Monday had started off so well. The patrons I'd met so far were wonderful. I'd introduced some juvenile readers to the perfect new series. And I'd experienced the profound joy of reuniting an older gentleman with a beloved story he'd feared he'd never see again, its title forgotten long before the emotional resonance. With the book in hand, he'd practically skipped out the front door.

  But all of that felt hollow now that I'd failed to win over my new boss.

  I wanted to throw myself at her feet and beg forgiveness. If she were my daughter, I'd know exactly what to do. I'd tickle her and wrestle her for the best beanbag chair. But Kathy Carmichael was an adult, a grown woman with somewhere between two and five full-grown sons—she'd kept mentioning various sons in passing but hadn't gone into detail.

  I left the head librarian alone and decided to try harder on Tuesday.

  I kept my head down for the rest of the day and focused on doing my job.

  At the end of my shift, I used the library's old-fashioned punch-card system to punch out my time card with a loud KERCLUNK.

  The loud punch-card system was another of the institution's strange little quirks. It was an awfully noisy choice for a place of quiet.

  As I exited through the front door, I pulled out my phone and checked my daughter's recent messages. According to the last grouping of texts, she'd had a smooth first day at her new school. She was staying late to get some extra homework. The teachers didn't want to overload her, but she insisted.

  I smiled. That was my Zoey.

  Since I had some free time, I took out my to-do list to figure out what to do next.

  There was only one item: buy new boots.

  Chapter 9

  After the dry air of the library, the outside world felt moist and breezy. The clean, floral scent of spring invigorated me. I had a spring in my step as I walked down the street. The pretty town of Wisteria was all around me, so charming with its old stone buildings and many downtown churches. I'd never seen so many churches in such a relatively small area.

 

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