Meredith Potts Fourteen Book Cozy Mystery Set

by Meredith Potts

  My breath shortened as my anxiety level elevated. I had to take a few deep breaths before I was calm enough to answer. “I wish I could.”

  With each vague reply, I secretly hoped that she would become discouraged and drop the subject. Instead, she just pushed forward.

  “Can I buy it?” Edna asked.

  The vagaries had gotten me nowhere. If I was going to make any headway, I would need to be direct with her.

  “It’s not for sale,” I said.

  She shrugged off my response. “Everything has a price.”

  I shook my head. “Not this.”

  “Not even for a hundred dollars?”

  I stared her down. “I’m afraid not.”

  A steely look was in her eyes. “Two hundred.”

  What part of “not for sale” did she not get? She didn’t seem to be listening to me.

  “I’m not selling it.”

  Edna narrowed her eyes. “Three hundred.”

  My jaw nearly dropped. There was just no talking sense into her. Although, by that point, I was getting so choked up that I could barely speak. Finally, my emotions could not be bottled up any longer. I began to tear up.

  I grabbed a napkin to wipe my eyes just as I spotted Kelly returning from the storeroom.

  My friend’s presence allowed me to make a quick escape from this conversation. I seized the opportunity.

  I turned back to Edna. “I’m sorry. I have something in my eye. Kelly here will take your order.”

  Before Edna had the chance to give me a response, I darted to the back of the coffee shop.

  Chapter Four

  I ducked into the storeroom of the coffee shop to compose myself. With my emotions coming on so strong, I needed a moment alone to catch my breath. Taking a few deep breaths usually did the trick.

  As I sat on the ground, I reached for my locket and opened it up. I kept a photo of my sister inside it. That way she would always be close to me. With my gaze fixed on the photo, the sight of Jessica’s smiling face brought tears to my eyes. I tried to choke them back.

  It was incredible. Even after all this time, my emotions were still so raw every time I thought of my sister. They probably always would be.

  Just as I was trying to pull myself together, my fifty-four-year-old jet-black-haired mother walked by the doorway of the storeroom and spotted me sitting on the floor. A look of deep concern was on Elizabeth’s oval face.

  “Are you okay?” Elizabeth asked.

  I closed the locket and looked up at my mom.

  “Yeah. I just need a minute,” I replied.

  My mother stared at the locket and didn’t believe me for a second. She sat her trim body down next to mine and tried to get to the bottom of things.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  I couldn’t think of a worse place to be having this conversation. There I was, in the middle of a workday, falling to pieces in our storeroom, with my mother’s concerned eyes fixed on me. Normally, I needed to have a few glasses of wine in me to be able to talk about my sister.

  With no chardonnay in sight, I would have to tough this out while being completely sober. Notice how I didn’t say that avoiding this topic was a possibility. My mother was the kind of woman who didn’t take “no” for an answer. That didn’t stop me from trying.

  The topic of my sister was one that I did not have an interest in diving into at the moment. I had ducked into the storeroom to keep my pain to myself. Discussing my inner turmoil was not on my agenda. I just wanted to cobble myself back together and continue on with my day.

  “I’d rather not talk about it,” I said.

  Would my mother take my cue?

  Apparently not. A look of determination was on her face and showed no signs of going away. Even more, as my mother was not one to make small talk, she instead opted to cut right to the heart of the matter.

  “It’s about Jessica, isn’t it?”

  I thought that I had closed the locket before my mother had a chance to see me staring at it, but maybe I wasn’t as quick as I thought. Not that it mattered. My mom had incredible instincts. I didn’t know how she could always pinpoint what was on my mind at any given time, but she just did.

  When I saw the focus in her eyes, I realized it was no use to avoid the topic.

  Before diving into emotionally choppy waters, I took a deep breath then replied, “Yes.”

  Elizabeth sat down next to me and put her arm over my shoulder. “I miss Jessica, too.”

  With the topic already broached, instead of pulling back, I dug deeper. “It is more than just missing her. I feel like I wake up every day with a piece of me missing. I mean, we’re living our lives with this big question mark hanging over our heads.”

  My mom sympathized. “I know what you mean. When I sit down to pray every night, she is the first thing I pray to God about. Not a day goes by that I don’t ask for answers, for clarity, and for a map to brave this uncharted territory we’re living in.”

  I took a deep breath. “Sometimes I think about what I’d give to just talk to her once more. What I’d say to her.”

  My mother stared into the distance. “I’d just hold her and tell her how much I love her.”

  I agreed. The same thing had run through my mind many times.

  I bounced my knee nervously. “To me, the hardest part is not knowing where she is. What happened to her. If she’s even alive.”

  That was where my mother and I deviated. While sometimes I found hope hard to come by, my mom didn’t let doubt seep into her brain.

  “You must not give up hope,” she said. “The answer is out there somewhere. We just haven’t found it yet.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but no words came out. When I finally untied my tongue, I responded. “Do you think she’s still alive?”

  Up until then, my mother had been filled with confidence. That sureness was noticeably absent with her answer. “I want to believe.”

  I stared long and hard into my mother’s eyes. “Do you think we’ll ever find out what happened to her?”

  My mother’s answers became less certain with each question I asked. The same was true of this one.

  “Like I said, I just keep praying every night. I figure eventually the Lord will give me an answer,” she replied.

  I clutched the locket around my neck. “I hope so.”

  My emotions were as raw as they had been in a long time. So naturally that was when my tall, pear-shaped fifty-six-year-old stepfather, Luke Norton, walked through the back of the coffee shop carrying a bag.

  “Who wants cookies?” Luke asked.

  It was rare for a man’s hair to be going gray and bald at the same time, but that dubious rarity was happening to Luke. With the last of his hair follicles clinging to his scalp, it made his facial expressions stand out even more. So when he saw my mother and me sitting on the ground in the storeroom, he couldn’t hide the confusion on his face.

  Luke had a unique sense of timing. Not just that morning, but the entire time I had known him. It was hardly the first emotionally charged situation that he had been put in the middle of. As a matter of fact, that was how he had entered my mother’s life in the first place.

  While Luke was technically my stepfather, he was more of a dad to me than my biological dad ever was. My birth father, Walter Cobb, had spent his life waging an all-out war against sobriety. With Walter’s penchant for the bottle, it was no surprise when my mother divorced him when I was four years old.

  In the twenty-four years since then, Walter has spent more time with beer bottles than with me. As it was, I couldn’t tell you what city my birth father was living in at that moment, much less what he was doing with his life, or if he even thought about me ever.

  Luke, meanwhile, began dating my mother when I was six years old. Like most children of divorce, my sister and I were reticent to accept Luke into our lives at first. It took a while, but eventually, he won us over. When my sister and I did accept finally accept him, Luke
became the father I never really had. Someone who was caring and kind and attentive. Just as important was the fact that he treated my mother like a queen. After all the drama my mom had been through with my birth father, my mother deserved a man like Luke in her life.

  Although as Luke stood in the doorway to the storeroom that morning, he looked confused.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  If my mother and I answered truthfully, we could end up going much deeper down the rabbit hole and even drag Luke in with us. Instead, my stepfather’s arrival acted as a good impetus to shelve the conversation about my sister for the moment and carry on with the day.

  My mother forced a smile. “It will be when I get a cookie in my mouth.”

  Luke’s forehead wrinkled. “What did I miss?”

  I stared at the bag in Luke’s hand. “Let’s just focus on the cookies.”

  After eating a few cookies, I was able to cobble myself together and continue with my workday.

  That night, when my shift was over at the coffee shop, the emotions I had tried so hard to shelve caught up with me all over again.

  Chapter Five

  I had one destination on my mind when I left work that afternoon—memory lane. Shortly after returning home, I plopped down on the comfy couch in my living room and took a nostalgic trip into the past by loading some old videos on my laptop. I had an entire library’s worth of clips featuring my sister and me on my computer. One by one, I went through them, delving deeper into the past with each one that I played.

  Then I stumbled upon one clip in particular that hit especially close to home given the events that had unfolded that morning. The recording was from my seventeenth birthday. It had been a picturesque day at the beach. The sun glistened on the water. The ocean waves crashing behind me acted as a perfect backdrop to the picnic lunch that my mother had packed. The camera work was courtesy of my stepfather, who zoomed in as I opened a present from my sister.

  It was such a simple video, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it. I zeroed in on my sister, who watched with great anticipation as I took the lid off of the box she had given me. Inside was the heart-shaped locket. In the video, I pulled the locket from the box and admired it.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  Jessica’s enthusiasm didn’t stop there. “Look inside.”

  I popped the locket open and gazed at the photo of my sister that was inside it.

  “I figure this way I’ll always be close to you,” Jessica said.

  She was delighted to see how touched I was by her gift.

  “Thank you so much,” I replied.

  “You really like it?” Jessica asked.

  “Of course I do. I love all of your gifts.”

  “You sure know how to bring a smile to my face.”

  “I could say the same thing about you,” I replied.

  Jessica leaned in and gave me a hug. “I love you, Sabrina. Happy birthday.”

  I paused the video right there as my emotions proved too difficult to bottle up. Luckily, I had a box of tissues by my side. That box could be empty by the end of the night.

  There was one defining thing that stood out as I watched all of those old videos. Each clip served as an example of just how full of life my sister had been. How much love she had in her heart. And how kind she was.

  Each recording that I saw of her made me miss her even more. She had been so full of potential. Growing up, I always believed that she was destined to do great things. Then, just like that, she was gone, never to be heard from again.

  That last part certainly wasn’t from a lack of effort. After Jessica’s disappearance, the police had conducted an exhaustive search that had spanned a series of months. By the time they were done, it seemed like they had scoured every inch of Treasure Cove and the surrounding areas looking for her. That was why it was so hard to swallow the fact that there was nothing to show for their efforts.

  In all their months of searching, they weren’t able to uncover a single clue that pointed to what had happened to Jessica. It was like she had just vanished into thin air. I refused to accept that as an explanation. The truth was out there somewhere, I just didn’t know what it was or how to find it.

  To me, the lack of closure was the real killer. It didn’t matter how much time had passed. As long as a cloud of mystery continued to surround my sister’s disappearance, my wounds could not heal.

  Days kept speeding by on the calendar, but in a way, part of me always remained trapped in that horrifying moment, running back and forth down that country road, calling out hopelessly to my sister, only to receive no reply.

  Unfortunately, that dangerous playground was where my thoughts decided to drift off to. Before I was overcome with too much sadness, my happy-go-lucky six-year-old corgi, Snickerdoodle, jumped up on the couch and curled up beside me. His bark was enough to pull my head from the clouds.

  Snickerdoodle gave me the kind of doe-eyed puppy-dog look that could melt my heart. The best thing about corgis was that they were such naturally happy animals that it was hard to be sad around them. So much of the time, their mouths were open, making them look like they were smiling.

  If their jovial moods weren’t enough of a welcome sight, they also happened to be adorable to no end. With such stumpy legs, long bodies, and satellite-dish ears, it was hard to deny their cuteness. When I spent time around Snickerdoodle, it typically didn’t take long for my mood to improve. That theory was suddenly put to the test.

  Regardless of my emotional state, I wasn’t about to deny my little guy the pats that he so desperately wanted. I talked to Snickerdoodle like he was an old friend rather than a dog who didn’t speak a word of English.

  “I know you’re doing your best to cheer me up. Unfortunately, it’s just one of those nights.”

  Snickerdoodle didn’t give up. With his mouth open, he continued to hold his tongue out as he gave me an adoring gaze. I admired his determination to cheer me up.

  Even though I was still an emotional wreck on the inside, I forced a smile so that Snickerdoodle didn’t feel like his efforts had been in vain. He put his head down on my lap and wagged his tail.

  As I looked down at him, I was touched by what a good heart he had. He wasn’t just loyal and affectionate—he was the best dog I could ever ask for.

  He also didn’t look like he was determined to stay by my side for as long as it took to cheer me up. In true dog fashion, all of his plans went out the window when he heard my doorbell ring.

  Snickerdoodle sprang up, bounded off the couch, and bolted to my front door, barking the entire way. He was eager to see who was on the other side of the door, but I sure wasn’t.

  I had no intention to answer the door. Most likely, whoever was there wanted to sell me some magazine subscriptions. Either thatm or they worked for some activist organization that wanted me to sign a petition. Even on the off chance that a little girl was at the door trying to sell me delicious cookies for her scout group, I wasn’t interested.

  My lack of response didn’t deter whoever was at the door. A second doorbell ring followed, which only made Snickerdoodle bark even louder.

  I remained on my couch, determined to ignore whoever was at the door until they went away. Imagine my surprise when the next noise I heard was the sound of my phone ringing. As I looked at the caller ID screen on my phone, I realized that the call was coming from my boyfriend, David Carlson.

  Before I had the chance to take the call, I heard David’s deep, booming voice talking to me from the outside.

  “Sabrina, if you’re there, will you open up?” he asked.

  I knitted my brow. What was he doing here at such an early hour? David didn’t even get off work until six. I looked down at my phone to see what time it was.

  Yikes.

  Amazingly enough, it was seven o’clock. It turned out that I had been watching videos on my laptop for longer than I thought.

  There went the afternoon. It was nightfall. No wond
er David was at my door. We were supposed to go out for dinner.

  I got up from my couch and opened the front door.

  “Hi, David,” I said.

  David was five-eleven and muscular, with short black hair and a square, clean-shaven face. The twenty-eight-year-old wore a blue button-down dress shirt and a pair of tan slacks. What I noticed most about him right then, however, was the concerned look in his soulful brown eyes.

  My boyfriend immediately saw that I was in rough shape. “Are you okay?”

  I lied to him. “I’ll be fine. It was just a crazy day.”

  He didn’t believe me. That wasn’t a surprise. After all, the man was a police detective. He had a knack for sniffing out the truth. Besides, David knew me all too well. It was hard to hide much of anything from him, much less raw emotions. Empathy was one of David’s strong suits.

  He wrapped his arms around me. “Come here. Whatever is going on, we’ll get through it together.”

  It felt good to be in his arms. I wanted him to know just how much I appreciated his attempt to comfort me. “Thank you.”

  He pulled back from the hug and stared into my eyes. “It looks like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  My face tensed up. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “Do you want to cancel dinner?”

  I shook my head. “No. I need to get out of the house. I think some fresh air will be good for me.”

  “It’s okay. We can reschedule. Or I can order a pizza, and we can stay in if you’d like.”

  “That’s so sweet of you to say, but I do believe that the best thing for me to do right now is to get out of the house.”

  “Sure thing. Whatever will make you feel better.”

  “Just give me a minute to freshen up,” I replied.

  “No hurry. Take as long as you need.”

  I assured him. “I’ll only be a few minutes.”

  He smiled at me. “It doesn’t matter how much time you take. You’re worth the wait.”