Praise for the Gethsemane Brown Mystery Series
“The captivating southwestern Irish countryside adds a delightful element to this paranormal series launch. Gethsemane is an appealing protagonist who is doing the best she can against overwhelming odds.”
– Library Journal (starred review)
“Gordon strikes a harmonious chord in this enchanting spellbinder of a mystery.”
– Susan M. Boyer,
USA Today Bestselling Author of Lowcountry Book Club
“Charming debut.”
– Kirkus Reviews
“A fantastic story with a great ghost, with bad timing. There are parts that are extremely comical, and Gethsemane is a fantastic character that you root for as the pressure continually builds for her to succeed…in more ways than one.”
– Suspense Magazine
“Just when you think you’ve seen everything, here comes Gethsemane Brown, baton in one hand, bourbon in the other…There’s charm to spare in this highly original debut.”
– Catriona McPherson,
Agatha Award-Winning Author of The Reek of Red Herrings
“Gethsemane Brown is a fast-thinking, fast-talking dynamic sleuth (with a great wardrobe) who is more than a match for the unraveling murders and cover-ups, aided by her various–handsome–allies and her irascible ghost.”
– Chloe Green,
Author of the Dallas O’Connor Mysteries
“In Gordon’s Exceptional third mystery...her ghosts operate under a set of limitations, allowing her earthly protagonists to shine as they cleverly solve crimes. Fans of paranormal cozies will be enthralled.”
– Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“For any fan who has become completely enraptured by the character of Gethsemane Brown, you will not only love the ‘spirit’ in this one, but you will also be thrilled to join up with Gethsemane on her third adventure...an all-out, fun-filled story.”
– Suspense Magazine
“Gethsemane Brown is everything an amateur sleuth should be: smart, sassy, talented, and witty even when her back is against the wall.”
– Cate Holahan,
Silver Falchion Award-Nominated Author of The Widower’s Wife
“Erstwhile ghost conjurer and gifted concert violinist Gethsemane Brown returns in this thoroughly enjoyable follow-up to last year’s Murder in G Major…With the help of a spectral sea captain she accidentally summoned, Gethsemane tries to unravel the mystery as the murderer places her squarely in the crosshairs.”
– Daniel J. Hale,
Agatha Award-Winning Author
“In the latest adventures with Gethsemane, murder is once again thrust upon her and with determination and a goal, she does what needs to be done…The author does a great job in keeping this multi-plot tale intriguing…I like that the narrative put me in the middle of all the action capturing the essence that is Ireland. The character of Eamon adds a touch that makes this engagingly appealing series more endearing.”
– Dru’s Book Musings
The Gethsemane Brown Mystery Series
by Alexia Gordon
MURDER IN G MAJOR (#1)
DEATH IN D MINOR (#2)
KILLING IN C SHARP (#3)
FATALITY IN F (#4)
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Copyright
FATALITY IN F
A Gethsemane Brown Mystery
Part of the Henery Press Mystery Collection
First Edition | February 2019
Henery Press, LLC
www.henerypress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from Henery Press, LLC, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Copyright © 2019 by Alexia Gordon
Author photograph by Peter Larsen
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Trade Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-459-1
Digital epub ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-460-7
Kindle ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-461-4
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-462-1
Printed in the United States of America
To my parents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to:
My editors and the rest of the gang at the Hen House for making my books the best they can be;
Paula and Gina for their support and encouragement;
Kellye, Valerie, Abby, Cheryl, Tracy, and Rachel for the unicorn power;
Catriona McPherson and Hank Phillippi Ryan for letting me hang out with the cool kids;
My blog mates at Miss Demeanors and Femme Fatales;
My parents, Aunt Wilhelmina, and the rest of my family for their love and support;
Leslie Lipps for her graphic art skills;
Lifeworking Coworking for providing writing space;
The Deerpath Inn for letting me spend hours by their fireplace and for expanding my whiskey knowledge;
Missions Possible Bookstore at the Church of the Holy Spirit for shelving my books next to C.S. Lewis;
The Writer’s Path at SMU for helping me grow from wanna-be writer to published author;
The entire crime fiction community for proving people who write about murder are fun at parties (and are awesome, caring, supportive, and friendly, too);
To the book reviewers/bloggers for taking the time to review my books;
To Kristine Hall for still inviting me to Lone Star Lit book blog tours years after I left Texas;
To my friends for being there for me;
To the readers for being the reason I do this.
One
The flower shop’s heavy glass entrance door flew open.
“Ooph!” Gethsemane Brown flattened herself against the shop’s wall just in time to avoid being smashed. She cradled a pot holding an ailing miniature rose bush, little more than a twig with a few sad leaves, to her chest. Someone, impossible to tell whether male or female, hunched beneath a floppy hat and an unseasonable, shapeless sweater, rushed past her. A sprig of small purple blossoms fluttered from the just-visible bouquet clutched beneath the figure’s arm. “Excuse me!”
The person ignored her and hurried away down the sidewalk. Gethsemane watched until they disappeared around a corner. “Have a nice day,” she called after them.
“Welcome to Buds of May,” a woman’s voice said from inside the flower shop. “May I help you?”
Gethsemane gestured in the figure’s direction as she navigated past tall, fluted bins overflowing with cheerful flower arrangements. “What’s with him? Or her?” She set her flowerpot on the counter.
The woman behind the counter, a sweet-faced blonde about Gethsemane’s age, shrugged. “Everyone’s in a hurry these days, ain’t they?” A brass plaque attached to a cache pot crowded with miniature succulents identified her as Alexandra Sexton, Florist. She lifted the flowerpot and turned it back and forth to examine its sad resident. The dull, bloomless stems shed one of their few remaining leaves in response. “What’s happ
ened to this?”
“It’s dead,” a voice behind Gethsemane announced. She recognized Frankie Grennan, her friend and colleague at St. Brennan’s School for Boys. “What’ve you done to it?”
“I didn’t do anything to it.” Gethsemane frowned at the copper-haired math teacher and amateur rosarian as she reclaimed the pot from the florist. The plant lost another curled leaf.
“There’s your problem,” Frankie said. “You do actually have to water and feed it.”
“I watered it.” Gethsemane ran a finger across the soil’s surface. Dry. “Some. Maybe not as often as I should have but I did water it.”
Frankie took the plant from her. “I know what you did. You let the poor thing get dry as the Sahara then unleashed a monsoon on it with a little watering pot you bought for three Euros at the grocer then let it get desert-dry again. That’s no way to treat a rose.”
“I didn’t use a watering pot,” Gethsemane mumbled. “I used a juice glass.”
Alexandra frowned and clucked her tongue. “Tsk, tsk.”
“I won’t tell you what I think of your juice glass,” Frankie said. “Poor rose. Why didn’t you call me for help?”
“It’s just a plant—” Gethsemane began.
Frankie cut her off. “Just a plant?” He addressed the florist, “Did you hear that, Alexandra? She said a rose is ‘just a plant.’” He made a face at Gethsemane. “Up the yard with that. How’d you like me callin’ that fancy violin of yours ‘just an instrument?’”
Her Vuillaume “just an instrument?” No. She shuddered. Her nineteenth century masterpiece was a work of art. Frankie took roses as seriously as she took music. “Sorry. Plants are nice. I mean roses are nice. Beautiful. Magnificent.” Her cheeks flushed. “I’ll stop talking now.”
Alexandra leaned her elbows on the counter and lowered her voice as if she shared a great secret. “Actually, the global floriculture market brings in tens of billions worldwide every year. People have killed for a lot less than billions.”
Gethsemane lowered her tone to match Alexandra’s. “Floriculture?”
“The flowering and ornamental plant business, including roses.”
“Billions?” Why was she whispering? “Billions,” she repeated in her normal voice, “As in dollars? Euros? For flowers?”
“Flowers,” Frankie said. “Which you send to your Ma on Mother’s Day and her birthday, bedeck the church with at weddings, send to your girlfriend when you’re courting, your wife when you’re apologizing—”
Gethsemane held up a hand. “Okay, I get it. That’s a lot of flowers.” But still…
“Don’t forget the ones you plant in your garden,” Alexandra reached over the counter and poked at the wan stems in Frankie’s hand and frowned at Gethsemane, “or buy from the grocer. Did you know over 40 percent of the cut flowers you Americans import are roses? Maybe you should stick to the cut ones.”
Gethsemane flushed and turned back to Frankie. “I wasn’t belittling roses. I only meant I didn’t think you’d have the energy to resuscitate my sad little plant. It’s only been a minute since your, er, illness.” Frankie, like the rest of Dunmullach’s first-born males, had fallen victim to a wasting sickness unleashed by the curse of an angry spirit determined to avenge herself for the evil done to her centuries ago. If not for the actions of the ghosts of Eamon and Orla McCarthy, the late owners of Gethsemane’s cottage, actions that exacted great sacrifice from the McCarthys, Frankie, and a good portion of the village’s other males, would have died. “You’ve hardly had time to get back on your feet.”
“It’s been six months and I’m fine now.” Frankie’s tone left no doubt the reticent math teacher intended to stick to his practice of keeping his private life private. “St. B’s staff gardener and some of the senior boys helped me keep up the garden.” He caressed one of the miniature rose’s more tenacious leaves with a finger. “And I’m never too busy for roses.”
“Word at the pub pegs you as the odds-on favorite to win best garden this weekend,” Alexandra said.
The International Rose Hybridizers’ Association had selected Dunmullach to host the open competition portion, which pitted professional rosarians against skilled amateurs, of their Thirteenth Annual Rose and Garden Show. Gethsemane may have been as much of an expert in flower shows as she was in Sanskrit—which is to say, not at all—but she’d heard of the IRHA’s annual show, which was almost as prestigious as the Chelsea Flower Show, even before she’d been asked to perform during the opening and closing ceremonies. A breeder who won a gold medal at the IRHA Annual Rose and Garden Show could sell or license their hybrid to one of the professional growers who scoured the event for promising cultivars to introduce to the market and potentially earn enough money to buy a small planet. Residents of the host city won the privilege of competing their gardens as well as cut flowers. Frankie had hybridized a rose, which almost no one, including her, had been allowed to see, and planned to enter it in both divisions.
Gethsemane sighed a mixture of guilt and resignation. A compost bin was the only place she’d be entering her rose. It wasn’t boasting to say she had many talents: multi-instrumentalist, conductor, composer, and—three solved mysteries to her credit—amateur sleuth. However, gardening and cooking were two arenas not in her skill set. She tapped a finger against the neglected rose’s pot. “Can you save it?” she asked Frankie.
“Well…” He bent one of the stems. It snapped off in his fingers. He bent another. It held. He offered Gethsemane a dimpled half-grin. “Maybe it’s only mostly dead.”
“Which is slightly alive.” She returned the grin. She and Frankie shared a fondness for movie quotes. Casablanca was their go-to but The Princess Bride never disappointed as a source.
“No promises, mind you. I may be a handsome mathematical genius,” he winked, “with a knack for flora, but I’m no Miracle Max.”
“I have faith in you, Grennan. And speaking of handsome…” Gethsemane stepped back and gave him the once-over. “What’s with the haircut and beard trim?” Frankie seldom paid much attention to his appearance. Although he never crossed the line into sloppy or unkempt, he wore his hair on the long side, his beard on the bushy side, and his clothes on the baggy side; a grownup version of Shaggy from the Scooby-Doo cartoon. In the almost-year she’d known him, the only time he’d polished his appearance without cajolement had been when the statuesque fashionista and true crime author, Venus James, came to the village. Most of the over-twenty-one men in Dunmullach had done the same, eager to impress the stylish American author. For a time, the pub had looked more like the scene of a men’s magazine fashion shoot than the neighborhood watering hole. “Gotta date? It’s not that new Latin teacher is it? The pretty blonde?”
Frankie adjusted his glasses. “No, I do not have a date and no, it isn’t the Latin teacher. I am not dating the Latin teacher. Whose name is Verna, by the way. We’re friends. I have lots of friends.”
“No, you don’t. You’re selective with your friendship and you don’t suffer fools. Not that Verna’s a fool. She likes you. In the romantic sense of the word. The chemistry teacher told me. He heard it from the French teacher.”
“Who’s a notorious gossip and slightly less reliable than the internet.”
“A waitress at the Mad Rabbit verified it. Gossip from the Rabbit is more reliable than the BBC.”
“I watch RTÉ.” He turned to Alexandra. “I came in to pick up my boutonniere.”
“A flower for your,” Gethsemane brushed a thread from his shoulder. Several more threads framed his sport jacket collar like eyelashes, “somewhat frayed lapel and a twenty Euro trip to the barber. If not romance, what’s the occasion?”
“It’s picture day.”
“Picture day? Not until the second week of school.” St. Brennan’s headmaster had texted the faculty a week ago warning them they’d be expected to pose for headshots fo
r the new edition of the school’s directory.
“Pictures for the Dispatch,” Frankie said. “They’re doing a feature on the competition.”
The florist retrieved a single orange-red rose bud in a clamshell case from a cooler filled with a panoply of blooms and handed it to the math teacher. “We’re all pulling for you, Frankie. You’ll do the village proud.”
“From your lips to the judge’s ears.” Frankie slipped the bud into the buttonhole of his wrinkled left lapel.
“You’re not wearing this to a photo shoot?” Gethsemane asked. She pulled aside the jacket to reveal an ancient Newport News Jazz Festival t-shirt.
“What’s wrong with this?”
She tugged at the pocket of his wrinkled khakis and rephrased her question as a statement. “You are not wearing that to a photo shoot. Do you even own an iron?”
Frankie sniffed. “It’s a feature in the local paper about a garden show, not a fashion shoot for a men’s magazine. No one cares what I wear.”
“Never say that to a tailor’s granddaughter.” Her grandfather had been a high-end men’s tailor in Washington, D.C. She’d gained an eye for, and an appreciation of, men’s haberdashery from time spent with him. “Of course, people care. Haven’t you heard the expressions, ‘The clothes make the man’? ‘It’s better to look good than to feel good’? The Dunmullach Dispatch may not be GQ or The Rake, but your pictures will still be seen by hundreds—” The clerk snickered. Gethsemane ignored the interruption. “—dozens of people and will last far longer than your roses.”
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