Silver Lake Cozy Mystery Bundle

by Hugo James King

  I butted my lips; I had no words.

  “Poor woman,” Ruth grumbled.

  “I hope whoever sent them wasn’t harassing her,” he said. “I’d hate to think someone was out to get her.”

  “Thank you,” I finally said. “Have you told Paul?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

  “Oh, no,” Ruth said, gently patting his shoulder. “Just do and say what’s right, nobody but the people doing bad will get in trouble.”

  He smiled. “Thank you.” He pulled away his cap and combed a hand through his hair. “My dad’s still gonna take time to get over it. He was close with Doreen.” His posture changed as he moved on his legs. “I should get my order. People will go hungry if I don’t get these sandwiches to the shop.”

  “Well, thank you, Max,” I said.

  He left our table, hurrying to the register counter.

  “Sweet boy,” Ruth said.

  “Yesterday he was a little moody,” I added in a low voice, “but when his dad almost cried, he stepped out and took control. I admired that.”

  “And with what he’s said, I want to know more about this Mr P person.”

  I nodded. “Likewise.”

  “We should go, tonight.”

  “Where?”

  “Doreen’s house, maybe there’s something we can find to connect this mystery person to her. Maybe another letter.”

  “Ooh,” I nodded. “You’ve got the bug now.”

  “It’s better than me recommending you go alone,” she said. “Because I know your mind would go there, and you’d end up calling me after going—or worse, getting caught out by Paul on patrol.”

  She was right. It was better than her putting the idea in my head and letting me go alone. That’s probably why Paul thought I needed saving; I didn’t have a partner to help me. Ruth was that partner.

  FIFTEEN

  After lunch with Ruth, my mind filled with thoughts about the village and who could’ve possibly known about Doreen and her daughter. After everything I knew turned out to be far from the truth, I wanted to know if there was more to the story, and there were two people who’d have enough gossip between them to fix up some semblance of a believable story.

  Nancy and Francesca were both in the newsagents. As usual, I left Charlie in the car and walked into the shop. My mind was fixed on questions, but I didn’t quite have a plan; I was sure they’d spill once I led them.

  “Eve,” Fran said from behind the counter. “Have you seen Doreen’s daughter flitting around?”

  Easy enough. “Her daughter?”

  “Whose daughter?” a loud voice screeched from the back of the shop. Nancy came charging down an aisle. “Oh, hello, Eve.”

  “Doreen’s,” Fran said, snapping at her sister as she pressed her chest across the counter. “Doreen’s daughter is back in town, and she’s got her son in tow.”

  “Could you believe it?” Nancy scoffed. “A child. He must be what—sixteen, seventeen by the looks of him.”

  “Oh?” I grumbled, my wide eyes glancing between the two of them. “I can’t say I’ve seen them,” I said. “You think they’re here to take care of her mother’s things?”

  Nancy scoffed louder. “Hardly,” she said. “Amanda wasn’t part of her mother’s funeral plan.”

  “Funeral plan?” I choked. She can’t have been that old, well—she was thinking about funerals. I hope it wasn’t expected of me to be thinking about them too. “What do you mean?”

  Fran chuckled. “She was hardly a spring chicken.”

  “We’ve got them,” Nancy added.

  “It’s a like a will,” she said. “But everything is already taken care of.”

  “Did you talk about it?” I asked, questioning further how close the twins were to Doreen. It seems I didn’t know how close anyone was now, even my husband.

  “Yes and no,” Fran said, extending herself further across the counter as her arms rested crossed over one another. “We’ve been close for years, but I think I said yesterday, we’re both business women, we’re busy.”

  “But we do both belong to the same knitting circle.”

  Silver Lake had a knitting circle? Well, I’d already asked them if she was seeing someone already, and they’d laughed it off. Perhaps they didn’t know Doreen as well as they assumed.

  “She told us all about how she didn’t want her daughter getting her hands on the money,” Nancy chimed in. “Swore to us she’d spend it all on drugs, so no wonder she’s sniffing around, probably looking for a will in that place.”

  “I heard the police had it corded off with caution tape,” I said.

  They shrugged together.

  It seemed they didn’t know much more than what I’d already learned myself. “Hopefully she’s not here for that,” I said. “She has a child; I doubt she’s still the same person she was when she left.”

  “Leopards don’t change stripes,” Fran called out.

  “Tigers!” Nancy shouted.

  “Don’t change tigers?” she grumbled, snarling her upper lip.

  “Leopards have spots, tigers have stripes,” Nancy said once again, smacking at her sister’s arm. “If you’ve been drinking the sherry again, Francesca, I’ll be taking it out of your pay.”

  “Oh!” I smacked a hand against my head. “I came in for something to give Charlie and realised I grabbed something for him earlier.” My eyebrows moved wildly, expressing my current lie. “Well, I’ll leave you to it.”

  “See you later,” they called in unison.

  Leaving the newsagents, I took a deep breath and headed across the parking lot to my car. Charlie was standing with his paws at the window, panting condensation against the glass pane.

  I shooed him along to his seat before opening the door. “Got a sudden bout of energy,” I quipped. “Let’s get you home, you can run around in the garden.”

  Once we were home, I knew I’d be busy. I was going to dive straight back into the paperwork, and apparently making more of a mess in the kitchen than I was currently cleaning away into boxes.

  My husband was fastidious in keeping all his work and receipts. There would have to be something squirrelled away inside, something which documented him helping out Doreen’s daughter, Amanda, and maybe even a reason as to why he did it. Sure, it was a good deed, but there had to have been a more current reasoning behind it, maybe he knew who the father was.

  I had a lot of time to spend, at least while it grew darker. I’d agreed with Ruth we’d head out around 8 P.M. after sunset; when we could go around relatively unnoticed.

  It also meant I’d need to factor in dinner between sitting in the piles of paper on the kitchen floor.

  Charlie occupied himself in the garden from the conservatory. Making my job easier at going through individual pieces of paper without him trampling over them for attention once every ten minutes. He’d spent time yesterday turning his head at the papers rustling, thinking it was a biscuit or crisp wrapper.

  I prepared dinner at 6 P.M. finally able to use some of the free island counter space to chop vegetables. I prepared mushrooms and red peppers for risotto, alongside smoked salmon from the bottom of the freezer.

  As my pan bubbled, Charlie barked for my attention. I lowered the heat of the hob, letting the rice simmer while I checked on Charlie.

  Standing in the conservatory, he’d trailed dirt inside, circling the table with dots where his tiny feet had been.

  I should’ve made an educated decision when I sent him out into a garden which had been freshly laid with rain. And now, he’d need a bath. “Right,” I said, snapping my fingers.

  He walked slowly to my feet. I pulled him to my torso from at the stomach with both arms, holding him far from my body, I didn’t need dirt on my blouse.

  We walked back in through the kitchen and continued to the bathroom. “If you move from here and get dirt everywhere, I’m putting those socks on you to clean everything up.”
/>   They’d been a gag gift, but I had some. The socks you could use to polish the floor of dirt and dust. It was one way to walk on a wet floor without leaving dirty sock marks or footprints.

  I headed back into the kitchen and pulled the rice off the heat.

  After cleaning Charlie, I fed him, and then finally finished cooking my meal and fed myself.

  Once I’d eaten, the fear settled in, alongside doubt. Perhaps I’d never clean the kitchen, and all I was doing was expressing the mess further throughout the house itself.

  I shook myself out of it and cleaned what I could—mainly the dishes I’d used to cook with. It gave me breathing room and thinking space to reflect on what I was about to embark upon with Ruth.

  Another fear crept in, the fear of getting caught by Paul. I wasn’t worried about him slapping cuffs on my wrists as I highly doubt he would, but also because I knew his wife, Penny, and she’d give him absolute hell for arresting me.

  “Torch,” I grumbled. “Need to find a torch.”

  It was going to be dark, and we weren’t going to be turning on any lights inside Doreen’s house. Unless there were already people there, which I was only now thinking about. It was possible Amanda and her son were staying there.

  “In the garage,” I told myself, tapping at my temple.

  It’s where anything remotely mechanic was kept. Tools, torches, and even a spare tire. Basically, anything Harry would’ve dealt with, it was all in there.

  The garage was cold, even though it was filled with objects, the room itself was the coldest spot in the entire house. I turned the light on and the room bloomed with the deep orange spark.

  “Needle in a haystack,” I hummed, wading through all number of different items—it was possibly Harry who’d been the hoarder, and since he was gone, I was taking on his hoarding qualities.

  There were also more boxes piled inside. Some of them I hadn’t had time to tear open and add to the mass in the kitchen, but these boxes had been in good shape when they arrived all those years ago.

  Now, the boxes seemed to be soft to the touch, as if they’d absorbed too much water from the air—damp, perhaps.

  On the side of a box, ‘The Maude Green Trust’. His mother was Maude Green. A strange sense of recollection called to me, I remembered the charitable trusts he’d created, but not in his mother’s name.

  Ding. Dong.

  Charlie woofed and growled, his paws skittering around the kitchen tile.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  SIXTEEN

  At the front door, standing with a large smile on her face was Ruth. She wore dark-wash jeans and a black leather jacket. She swished her shoulders from side-to-side, modelling off her look.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “Good,” I said. “Dark.”

  She chuckled. “I brought over some supplies as well.” She pulled the plastic bag, swinging around on her arm. “I brought some gloves, medical grade ones too,” she said with a wink, “and some torches, because knowing you, you won’t be able to—” We walked inside, pausing at the kitchen. ”—be able to find them in this mess.”

  “I’m in the middle of cleaning,” I grumbled from behind her, closing the front door.

  Charlie raced at Ruth, throwing himself into her ankles. “Might need to leash him,” she said.

  “And hope he doesn’t bark at anything outside in the darkness.”

  She nodded. “Fingers crossed.”

  I watched as Ruth looked around the kitchen, the island counter was losing the heft of papers, but the floor and the boxes were gaining their own mass. “I’m getting there,” I said, passing her. “But I was looking for something, then like always, started making more mess.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, something to connect Amanda and my husband,” I replied. “I think I found something in the garage.”

  Ruth placed the plastic bag on the counter. “Let’s see.”

  We walked through into the garage, the light still on. I approached the box in the corner, piled on several other unused boxes, also filled with unused and unwanted objects.

  “Maude?” Ruth said.

  “My thoughts exactly,” I replied. “I wasn’t aware his mother’s name was on anything.”

  “Well, she was a huge part of his life,” she said. “Can’t be too shocked there was a trust. I bet she spearheaded it as well.”

  “Most likely.”

  I could’ve gone to ask her, but she wouldn’t have remembered. Her mind wasn’t sharp as it had been, and she would occasionally ask me where Harry was. I couldn’t tell her he’d died, it’s probably why his memory was still strong in me, whenever I visited Maude at the Petunia Heights care facility, I’d always have something to tell her—something I knew he’d have been doing if he was still alive today.

  “Did you look inside it?”

  “I was about to, before you knocked.”

  “Let’s get into it then!”

  And we did. We tore the plastic tape from the top of the box and inside, more of the same business I’d already been dealing with.

  “Papers,” I said, throwing a hand into the mix. “It’ll take forever to see if there’s anything about Amanda in here.”

  Ruth glanced to her watch. “We have time.”

  True. We did have time. Nobody was expecting us, and as long as we were able to get to Doreen’s house while it was dark, we’d have a fighting chance at finding out who the mysterious P person was in Doreen’s life.

  “Dig in!” I said, pulling out a stack of papers.

  Ruth grumbled, raising her brows and humming. “We need a box to put them in, we’re not turning this into another replica of your island counter.”

  She was right. She had a point. I couldn’t go around leaving a trail of destruction from where I’d pulled boxes apart and spent through all number of papers in search of a single answer, or a single sheet.

  We took the box into the kitchen, where it was both relatively warmer, and where there was already boxes being filled with paperwork.

  Ruth took a seat on the floor, pulling out a stack of paper.

  I sat beside her with my stack prepared.

  But nothing.

  Not a single mention of Doreen or her daughter.

  “Keep seeing Maude’s name on everything,” Ruth said. “And Harry’s name, obviously.”

  “I knew he set up many charities,” I continued. “But it doesn’t make sense. I feel like I barely knew anything about what was going on.”

  “He was helping people.”

  And that’s why I never asked questions. I knew he was helping people, and I knew he was doing good in the world. What I didn’t know was if there was anything I could’ve done to be more present in it.

  “Got it!” Ruth shouted, causing a chain reaction from Charlie. He yapped, bolting across the papers on the ground, slipping in all directions. “Amanda Maidstone, funding, apartment, new-born.”

  I grabbed the paper. My eyes already busy. There were several pieces, each stapled together. “Amanda Maidstone, going through hardship, disowned by mother. Pregnant by a married man. Amanda wishes to keep identity a secret. Young woman shows lots of motivation to find work and support child.”

  “Married man?” Ruth gasped, clapping a hand to her mouth. “Well,” she shrugged. “That part we already knew, otherwise why wasn’t the father in the picture.”

  I flipped through the papers. There was nothing naming the married man, even after saying she wasn’t going to, but I had hope.

  “So, Amanda never came back because of a man who got her pregnant,” I said. “A married man, and that’s basically most older men around here.”

  “Doreen must’ve known who,” she said.

  “Surely, you’d want to protect your daughter from that,” I said. “If this was Annie, and you found out she was having someone’s child who was already married, would you kick her out?”

  She shook her head, vehemently. It wasn’t a que
stion. “Annie would never do that,” she said. “But if she did, I’d help her through all her options.”

  “Sounds like Doreen was trying to cover something up,” I said. My teeth gnashed. “Which I hate to believe, because the woman always seemed nice. Always someone I could talk to, and—and—” I quickly caught my breath. “Harry wouldn’t have gone into business with Doreen if he didn’t somewhat trust her.”

  Ruth dusted the pages from her lap, throwing them back into the box. “We have our answer,” she said. “Harry helped Amanda, Amanda was having a married man’s baby, and now we’re going to Doreen’s empty house to seek answers.”

  “Let’s hope she kept some diary or had one of those ‘I’m sorry I did this’ letters penned in advance,” I said with a sigh. I emptied the bulk of papers in my lap back into the box, keeping the paperwork with Amanda’s name scribbled on them in my clutches. “Maybe Amanda did it.”

  “It’s suspicious,” she replied. “Back here after all those years, a hate for her mother given the situation. Reuniting with her own father.”

  “She seems to trust me—or at least, she trusted Harry,” I said. “I should see her tomorrow, see if she can tell me anything else about her son’s father. If it is her doing this, I’d hate to imagine what she’ll do next.”

  “If that’s the case, Eve,” Ruth began, her face creasing. “I doubt she’ll give you a straight answer. For all we know, she could be planning to murder the boy’s father. Then she definitely won’t tell you who he is. It would connect the dots and she’s the commonality between the two.”

  “Except, she doesn’t think I’m some police officer,” I said, tapping at my forehead. “I’ll just need to get her to tell me who he is on her own.”

  “I can join you tomorrow,” she said. “After my mid-morning shift at the care home.”

  Tomorrow was Saturday, and everyone in town would be waking up later, but everywhere would be much busier with tourist foot traffic.

  I snapped my fingers. “Well, let’s get to Doreen’s house to find some answers then.”

  “Are you dressed and ready?” Ruth looked me over.