Holy Crepes
Priscilla Pratt Mystery #4
Melissa Monroe
Copyright © 2018 by Cinnamon Cozies
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover Design by Stunning Book Covers
Recipes by Jennifer Weiss
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About the Author — Melissa Monroe
Melissa Monroe grew up in a small Missouri town where dogs outnumbered people, and the biggest monument it had to boast was a four-way stop. Melissa’s highest aspiration as a child was to become a vampire. Despite the fact she crisps in the sun, it wasn’t to be. In college she came to be something close, staying up all hours and consuming an unholy amount of warm caffeinated beverages to attain a journalism degree at Missouri Western.
A habitual insomniac and coffee addict, Melissa spends her days penning works of fantasy, romance and mystery, occasionally emerging from her office to feast on the snacks of the living. She currently lives in Saint Joseph, Missouri, with her husband Matthew.
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chocolate & Strawberry Crepes Recipe
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Thumbprint Cookies Recipe
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Coconut Cream Pie Recipe
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Epilogue
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A small-town pets journalist gets her first taste of amateur sleuthing — and a taste of just how pets-crazed her hometown has become.
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A vampire baker —before she opened shop — sinks her teeth into a local mystery.
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Chapter One
Bellmare was currently experiencing the hottest summer on record since 1953, and Priscilla was beginning to wonder if there was something to those myths after all. Maybe it was actually possible for a vampire to burn in the sun.
It didn’t matter that they’d set up beneath the shade of a large oak tree in front of the courthouse. It didn’t matter that the organizers had tried to beat the heat by placing industrial- sized fans on the lawn for the onlookers. There were just too many people on the grassy lawn. Human body heat added up, and even at sunset, when she’d been booked to serve, it was still a whopping ninety-degrees Fahrenheit. Apparently the temperature had dropped five degrees with the approach of night, but Priscilla hadn’t been able to tell through the unadulterated swell of humanity that streamed past her booth.
“I don’t envy you,” Anna said breezily from her lawn chair a few feet away. “You look miserable over that griddle.”
Priscilla was miserable. She wasn’t able to perspire the way normal human bodies sought to cool themselves. On one hand, that was good, because it saved her the trouble of having to dab herself every five minutes to keep sweat out of the food. But on the other, it also meant that there was no relief from the heat. Vampire bodies absorbed the ambient temperature, which meant that this was the closest she’d been to normal human body heat since her death in 1662.
“If you’re concerned, you could always go get me a fan,” she said in an undertone.
“But I’d have to move,” Anna groaned. Even with the personal battery-operated fan that she’d directed at herself, she was still pink in the face and sweating beneath the thin cotton shirt she wore. The white hadn’t been a good choice, in Priscilla’s opinion. It was quickly becoming see-through in places, and showing more than Anna probably wanted.
But then again, her assistant had been single for months now. Perhaps the short shorts, nearly diaphanous top, and big blonde pigtails were more than an effort to beat the heat.
“Why don’t you just make Dean do it?” Anna asked.
Priscilla’s eyes flicked almost unwillingly to where her newly adopted son sat, several yards away. He had his head buried in a comic book, and only his mop of dark curls was visible from her vantage point. She knew he’d be able to hear them if he was straining. After all, he was a vampire too.
At the end of February, almost five months ago to date, she’d taken in sixteen-year-old vampire Dean Chapman, who’d been in the system since his turning four years before.
He had barely said anything to her since that day.
Apparently that was a risk you ran when you adopted angry, displaced children from foster care. It wasn’t a unique phenomenon, or so Priscilla’s limited technological skills had told her. She was pretty hopeless at surfing the web and needed Anna’s help to do it. But she didn’t want her assistant knowing just how much Dean’s rejection bothered her.
When Parliament, the vampire governing body, had struck a deal with the US and gotten all of the vampires within its borders legitimized as citizens, it had come with unforeseen side effects. For example, what did one do with underage vampires? They were never going to get physically older or contribute to society in a meaningful way. They couldn’t just be killed either, so the solution was foster care. Any vampire turned below the age of emancipation was funneled into the foster care system.
And here was the result. An unpleasant, antisocial boy who ate her food and barely said a word to her while doing it.
Teenagers.
Priscilla’s shoulders slumped and she turned to her griddle with a sigh. She’d thought about fostering or adopting someone for years. It was a way to help a lost soul, and she’d been toying with the idea of expanding her family for some time. It just seemed the right thing to do. Until recently, she hadn’t had the space. The tiny flat above her shop hadn’t been enough to allow for another person. When her best friend Olivia had constructed an addition onto the back of the building for her restaurant, the Big Bowl, it had freed up enough attic space for one more person, and Priscilla had put it to use housing Dean.
She wasn’t sure why the young man seemed to hate her, and she wasn’t going to press. Olivia had said that was best. Olivia’s girl, Maddison, had been in similar circumstances before her own adoption, and Priscilla had been told it could take a child time to adjust.
“Never mind,” she muttered, and flipped the thin crepe shell she’d been preparing onto a plate with the others.
She’d been o
ffered a generous sum by the new head of the Bellmare Historical Society, Matilda Reid, to cater this event. Despite her previous run-ins with the historical society having been less than cordial, she wasn’t in any position to refuse paying work.
The trouble had started a year ago, when she’d been dragged into her unofficial part-time job as a police consultant. One of her clients, a wealthy bride, had been found poisoned inside of one of Bellmare’s historical sites. To clear her name, Priscilla had helped Police Chief Sharp, Anna’s father, bring the real killer to justice.
Unfortunately, the killer had been an influential member of the Bellmare historical society and her incarceration had had a long-lasting impact on Priscilla’s income. There had been a silent boycott of her shop encouraged by the members of the historical society in an effort to bleed her business dry. It had almost worked. Only the contributions of a few loyal customers, and a very pushy Hollywood executive, had kept her from going under in the six months the boycott had gone on.
Then, just when her business was beginning to recover, someone had been murdered inside Priscilla’s shop in the middle of one of the biggest holiday celebrations the town hosted. She’d been forced to shut down for a month. The first week had been mandatory, as crime scene technicians swept the place for evidence. The following three weeks had been her choice, but a necessary one in her opinion. She wanted nothing to taint her health rating at the next inspection, so she’d scrubbed the place from top to bottom until the very scent of cleaning supplies made her sick.
Now she was struggling to make up for the lost profits. At least Rose Bates had been deposed as head of the historical society. It wasn’t like Priscilla to wish ill health or death on people under normal circumstances. But she was secretly glad that Rose’s growing infirmities had forced her to move to assisted living in another town, and she was now no longer eligible to head the society. Matilda was much easier to work with and had browbeaten the rest of the women in the society into hiring her for this event.
Matilda was calling it “Crepes and Crawlies.” She apparently thought the play on words was very funny, and tittered every time she passed the signs advertising it. They were only a stone’s throw away from the stocks and gallows. There were no ghost tours tonight to detail their history, but some tourists snuck in to take photos of them anyway. The majority of the attention was on Willis Perry, a zookeeper who’d been hired alongside Priscilla to provide the “crawlies” for the event.
“And this here is a ball python,” Perry said now, wrapping the snake around his neck like a feather boa. “It’s the smallest python species found in Sub-Saharan Africa. Like all other pythons, it’s a non-venomous constrictor. It’s a favored species for pets because it’s small and usually pretty docile.”
A kid’s hand shot into the air. He looked about six or seven years old and was flanked by two adults Priscilla assumed were his parents. The woman was looking at the snake with a mix of revulsion and terror. The father looked sweaty and bored.
“What’s a constrictor?” he asked.
Willis Perry’s face split into a grin and he stroked the snake’s scales like it was a beloved pet, not a potentially lethal reptile.
“A constrictor squeezes its prey to death. Unlike this guy here—” He nudged the cage that contained a long, coiled king cobra with his foot, “—who bites his prey to slow it down and eventually kill it.”
“So it’s poisonous?”
“No,” Willis said. “Venomous. A helpful hint to remember is this. If you bite it and you die, it’s poisonous. If it bites you and you die, it’s venomous.”
“Unless you’re a vampire,” Dean muttered, not looking up from his comic book. “Vampire bites you and you die, that’s just poor manners.”
Priscilla had to restrain a snort of laughter. She’d been eying the king cobra with unease for a little while. She’d been poisoned once, and didn’t want to personally get to know the difference between poison and venom. She was sure it would probably feel similar, no matter how the toxin got into her system.
“That looks amazing,” Matilda enthused, leaning over Priscilla’s shoulder to check her progress. “Is that filling chocolate or hazelnut?”
Matilda looked like someone’s favorite grandmother. With gray hair and a gently lined face, she was pleasant to look at. She was short, with soft, pillowy arms and legs that would be comfortable to burrow into for story time. She usually dressed in some combination of denim and floral prints. Today she’d swapped out her usual jumper and shirt combination for a flowered tank top and a pair of capris.
“Chocolate,” Priscilla said, doling out a few tablespoons of batter onto her griddle.
She’d had to employ the use of a melting pot to keep the baking chocolate from forming a half-congealed pile of goo while she cooked the shells for the crepes. The combined heat of the griddle and pot made her wish she was human again, just so she’d stop feeling so feverishly hot. The body was made to sweat for a reason.
“Excellent. May I try one?”
Priscilla pursed her lips. “It’s your event. Do you pay five dollars for two crepes and a fruit cup?”
Matilda tittered again. “Of course, I do. What sort of person would I be if I didn’t donate to my own cause? We’re so close to our goal, dearie. I know we’ll get that house restored soon.”
Priscilla had to restrain another sigh. She wasn’t thrilled about the push to reconstruct the Blackthorn house. Wasn’t Bellmare full of enough grisly history to satisfy anyone? Did they need to reconstruct the home that had been burned down centuries ago with a relatively innocent woman inside?
She took Matilda’s money and slipped it into the pouch she’d been provided, with the multitude of other small bills. After flipping the shell on the griddle, she doled the chocolate and strawberries she’d prepared into two shells from the pile, folded them gently, and handed the plate to Matilda. Anna reached down into the cooler, dug out one of the plastic cups full of fruit that they’d pre-chopped before the event, and offered it to Matilda.
“Bon appetit,” she said with a big smile.
Matilda pinched her cheeks. “You’re a sweet girl,” she cooed before disappearing into the crowd. Priscilla was glad she hadn’t tried to do the same to Dean, who was watching her warily over the top of his comic book. Priscilla wasn’t sure if he was likely to bite or not.
“I hope she doesn’t try to hook me up with her son or something,” Anna muttered. “Do you know how many people have tried to set me up with their kids now that I’m single?”
Anna had been dating Jamie Emmerson, the rookie cop on the force, for almost a year. A few months back they’d split during a murder investigation, and Priscilla had never been able to shake the idea that she’d had a hand in Anna’s decision to break things off.
“She won’t,” Priscilla said, flipping a crepe shell onto the waiting plate. “Her son is engaged, and his fiancée is very pregnant.”
“Oh,” Anna said, glancing up at her in surprise. “… well, that’s good, I guess. Who needs a date anyway?”
Dean made a disgruntled noise behind his comic book.
Anna shot him a glance. “What’s eating you, kid?”
“I’m two years younger than you,” he grumbled. “I’m not a kid.”
Anna shrugged. “Fine, don’t talk to me.”
“Fine, I won’t,” he said, and then lapsed back into silence.
Priscilla stared at the cover of his comic book for another few seconds. What had that been about? It was more reaction than she’d gotten from him in months.
“Priscilla, your crepe is burning,” Anna reminded her timidly.
Priscilla swore and turned back to the griddle. The thin shell was beyond saving and she was forced to flip it into the trash bin.
What a miserable evening this was turning out to be.
The closer it got to dusk, the busier Priscilla became. The event had been advertised to start at 7:00, but most of the more interesting animals were n
octurnal, so more people were filing in closer to 8:30 or 9:00. The owls that Perry had brought were well-trained and could perform small tasks on command. He had a wide range of bat species to show as well, and the most widely anticipated was, of course, the vampire bat.
“Oh no,” Anna groaned, sinking still lower into her lawn chair. Her eyes were fixed on the end of the block, where a group of people clad almost entirely in white had assembled.
Priscilla’s heart sank. Of course they’d be here. They hadn’t missed a chance to protest once since they’d arrived. Why would they miss out on the chance to harass a group of townspeople, tourists, and small children peacefully attending an educational event?
The town had finally gotten around to knocking down the abandoned buildings at the edge of town. For years they had attracted squatters, drug dealers, and all kinds of wildlife. It had been a hassle for local police, who had been stuck with the unpleasant task of going into the condemned homes to root out troublemakers. Police Chief Sharp had been injured that way last year, when a meth dealer had taken a sledgehammer to his knee. He still had a slight limp when the weather dipped below freezing.
The clean-up had left ten miles of remote land unoccupied. The city had put it up for sale, and within a month someone had bought the entire thing. When the builders moved in and began working on a huge structure, people had begun to speculate who or what was moving to Bellmare. When the long line of trucks and vans marked with a rising sun had rolled past Priscilla’s windows on their way to the large compound, she’d known who they were dealing with.
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