Merry Wrath Mysteries Boxed Set Volume III (Books 7-9)

by Leslie Langtry

  Other than the four adults (including two employees who lived here), four girls, and eight players, the Council sent two staffers to help. One was Stacey Gillespie, the camp director who my girls loved, and the other was Satan. I'd love to say I'm kidding, but Juliette Dowd was my arch nemeses (and this is from an ex-CIA agent who literally had arch nemeses in the past).

  An angry young woman who had a thing for my husband, Juliette tried (and sometimes succeeded) in making my life miserable. I'd wanted to "kill" her off, but Linda said it would be too obvious. She had a point. Plus, Kelly thought I might really kill her instead of fake killing her, so she decided to remove the temptation for me and edited her right out of the script.

  "This house is awesome," I said for the one hundredth time today.

  Soo Jin nodded, her beautiful eyes wide with glee. "It's a Queen Anne Victorian! And it's original to the island."

  "How do you know that?" I asked. I didn't know that.

  She held up a book titled Islands in the Middle of Lakes in Iowa. "I found this at the library. I can tell you everything about this place!"

  "Is it an interesting history?" I asked. Maybe there was a ghost story! The girls would love that!

  Soo Jin flipped the book open and showed me a photo from the mid-1800s. "That's Jim Bentley." She pointed to a scowling man in the photo, standing next to a pretty young woman. "And that's his wife, June. Jim was cheated out of his life savings by a con man from Chicago."

  "So he got revenge?" Kelly asked.

  Soo Jin shook her head, "No. He developed tuberculosis and was sent to an asylum in Colorado. His wife, June, believed that his poor health was a result of the swindle. I guess they didn't really know what caused tuberculosis back then. Anyway, she tracked the crook down and lured him to the island, to this very house, and murdered him."

  "She killed him?" I gaped. "That's an opportunity missed. We could've built a ghost into the script."

  The medical examiner shrugged. "It was a pretty straightforward case. June admitted guilt and went to prison. Somebody bought the island after that, and since then it's been privately owned."

  "Too bad it wasn't an unsolved mystery," I said. "We could've plugged that in somewhere."

  Soo Jin smiled. "That's the only good story in the book. The rest are pretty boring."

  I could imagine. A book on islands in lakes in Iowa? Still, I had to give Soo Jin props for preparedness. That combined with her dazzling beauty was a source of aggravation for me. Since it was unreasonable to feel this way, I kept it to myself.

  "Okay, everyone!" Stacey appeared in the hallway. The tall woman with blonde hair and a permanent, infectious smile was easily likeable. She ran the Council's camps and was the perfect camp director, always ready with a game or song for the girls to keep them distracted (a talent that made me very, very happy).

  She clapped her hands together. "The boat is on its way here with the guests! Those who are staying need to get into their costumes and assume their roles! Those who are leaving should get ready to go!"

  Kelly, Linda, and the Kaitlyns waved goodbye and disappeared through the front door. They'd hide in the boathouse until the guests were unloaded and then take the boat back to the shore, where it would remain until lunchtime Sunday, when it would return for us.

  The unfortunately named Dead Otter Lake (an improvement on the original Native American name that translated to Stinky Water Where Animals Die and Men Get Dysentery was one of the largest in the state. Just twenty minutes south of Des Moines, in our home county. A very exclusive area, the lake was ringed with giant homes, each one bigger than the next.

  Penny Island sat dead center—a small five-acre wooded area with the large mansion in the middle. Our hosts, the Deivers, handed over their staff and the keys and fled for the big city. The only warning was that they had a mini Holland lop rabbit named Gertrude, that lived in the walls.

  "She's hiding from us at the moment," Audrey Deivers apologized. "You probably won't even see her while we're gone. We don't even know how she gets in and out of the walls." She went on to say that they'd put a small bale of Timothy hay and a water bottle in the mud room so the bunny would have access to food.

  "A mini lop?" I asked. "She must be small."

  Audrey gave me a look I couldn't translate. "You'd think so, wouldn't you? But no, it's actually larger than the Holland lop. Which was a huge surprise when she grew."

  Upon hearing about Gertrude, the girls launched the greatest manhunt since Jimmy Hoffa, searching high and low (including one rather optimistic search on top of the fridge) but never found the bunny. Audrey told us we might hear her thumping…a thing she did when angry.

  "They're here!" Lauren shouted from the front window.

  I shooed her and the other three girls up to our room to change their clothes. Soo Jin was waiting for us, already dressed in a fitted skirt, high heels, and an angora sweater with a circle pin. She looked ridiculously stunning. I tried not to hate her for it.

  The guests were supposed to arrive dressed in clothes from the 1950s. Linda had wanted to set the party in the '20s, but we couldn't find enough costumes for all of us, so the '50s it was.

  The four girls were dressed in sleeveless buttoned-up blouses, pedal pusher pants (that just looked like capris to me), socks, and saddle shoes, with their hair in ponytails tied with scarves. I had to admit, they looked adorable.

  As for me, I'd been dreading this moment. Kelly must've thought it hilarious when she brought the giant felt poodle skirt, short-sleeved blouse with Peter Pan collar, and loafers with pennies tucked into them.

  "I look like an idiot," I said as I surveyed myself in the mirror. "I'm too old for a poodle skirt."

  Soo Jin and the girls looked me up and down. Then my troop began laughing hysterically. I toyed with stuffing them into the walls with Gertrude.

  "Okay." Soo Jin approached and looked at my reflection in the standing mirror. "I think I can help."

  A few minutes later, Stacey and Juliette burst into the room, each looking very chic in pencil skirts, twinset cashmere sweaters, and high heels.

  "You look like an idiot!" Juliette sneered.

  Stacey shook her head. "What did I tell you about being negative?"

  The redhead simmered but kept her mouth shut. The camp director outranked her. But I knew if we were ever alone, the insults would flow like lava.

  The only thing Soo Jin was able to do was apply makeup and do my hair. My normally unruly, short dirty blonde hair had been curled into sleek waves away from my face and with the bloodred lipstick, mascara, and rouge, made me look completely different.

  "I think you look amazing!" Stacey said. "You should wear your hair like that all the time."

  I scowled at my reflection. Seemed like a lot of work.

  "Okay, everyone! The guests are getting settled in the parlor with cocktails. Does everyone remember their parts?"

  The girls nodded solemnly. Dr. Body giggled. I grudgingly shrugged, and Juliette disemboweled woodland creatures with her gaze. Okay, that didn't really happen. But in an alternate dimension, several chipmunks exploded.

  Stacey and Juliette left the room, and I looked back at the mirror. Actually, it wasn't bad. Except for the ginormous twenty-pound circle of heavy fabric around my waist, I looked okay. Stacey was right about the hair. How Soo Jin smoothed and styled it in a few minutes was beyond me. I probably shouldn't have kept my eyes closed the whole time.

  The Girl Scout Council staff was part of the show, as Soo Jin, me, and the girls were. The idea was that the guests were invited to a mysterious party in a house where it turned out the host wasn't present.

  There was a housekeeper who cooked and a groundskeeper too. These were played by the actual housekeeper, Miriam Cooper, and actual groundskeeper, Ned Odom. We hadn't had much time to get to know these two, but they were a bit standoffish while we were getting ready. If I had to guess, I'd say they weren't very happy about participating. I wondered how the Deivers had convinc
ed them.

  Miriam was maybe in her mid-thirties and seemed normal, just quiet. So quiet that she spoke in a smaller font. Ned, on the other hand, was maybe sixty years old and scary. At six feet, eight inches, he towered (and glowered) over all of us. If I hadn't already memorized the mystery, I'd say he did it.

  Stacey and Juliette were playing the parts of two socialite sisters who were also invited. They weren't the victims or the killer but a kind of buffer between us and the guests. Soo Jin and I were playing to type as the leaders of a stranded group of Girl Scouts taking shelter from a raging storm during a failed canoe trip gone wrong. Why the two of us were wearing skirts on a canoe trip had never been explained to us.

  And that was it. The guests, whom we were just about to meet, were the real players. We found our way to the lounge—a very large room with four couches, a fireplace, and many chairs. In the middle of the room was a small round table with a large silver tray on top.

  "The figurines!" I rolled my eyes. "We forgot them!"

  Linda Willard had modelled the event on the Agatha Christie novel, and in the book, as each victim was killed off, a figurine was found smashed. We'd been talking about it for weeks, but I'd totally spaced. Would the guests notice?

  Betty and Inez ran from the room and were back before we could yell at them. Betty set a box on the table, and Inez pulled out a very interesting sort of clay rabbit.

  "We made these!" the girl said proudly.

  One by one, the girls pulled eight Picasso-like attempts at woodland creatures (although I could swear one looked like a hippo) out of the box and set them up in a ring around the tray.

  "These are wonderful!" Stacey cried out as she bent close to inspect them. "You girls took the initiative and made these! Good job!"

  "All four of us did!" Ava said quickly.

  I reached for a disturbingly mutated pigeon, but Betty slapped my arm away. "Leave the squirrel alone," she said.

  Squirrel? "They're not exactly dry. How are we going to smash them if they're not smashable?" I asked.

  Lauren thought about this for a moment. "We could tear their heads off," she suggested.

  Voices came from the front entrance, and we took our places, with Betty shoving the box behind one of the couches. The girls were seated cross-legged on the floor, with Soo Jin and me in chairs behind them.

  Stacey stayed with us, while Juliette was greeting the guests. That seemed like having a spider greet flies before eating them. But maybe she was just pure unadulterated evil to me and me alone.

  The first to walk into the room was Dennis Blunt. Last week, I'd done my homework and looked up all the donors. Dennis was a sullen rich kid who'd never had to work a day in his life. He'd barely scraped through college, majoring in a degree of his own invention (or rather, based on his parents' generous donation to the school) in video gaming.

  If I had to guess, I'd say he was in his early thirties, but it was clear he was embracing a slovenly, slacker image, wearing a black T-shirt with some metal band on it, ripped jeans, and high-top sneakers. His hair was too long to be short and too short to be long, as if he'd found the one hairdresser who could do I-don't-care hair. He looked homeless, not wealthy. But his parents hadn't been able to come at the last minute, so he was their stand-in. Which explained why he wasn't in costume.

  Dennis rolled his eyes and sighed heavily as he slunk over to an overstuffed chair and fell into it with a loud groan. He didn't even look at the rest of us, acting as if we weren't even there.

  "Idiot," Betty mumbled under her breath.

  Thad and Wren Gable were the next through the doorway. A young professional, Thad was well known as one of the leading defense lawyers in the state. Nefariously known. Thad loved making waves, defending some of the worst criminals in Iowa, including the notorious Vy Todd—a convicted smuggler whose path I'd crossed not too long ago.

  Thad had a reputation for cheating on his wife, at times openly. His current paramour was going to be here as well. I wasn't sure how that was going to go down. Maybe there'd be a real murder after all.

  "Oh." He made a face as he saw the girls. "There are children here." The emphasis invoked images of a roach infestation in a sewage lagoon.

  Soo Jin put her hand on my arm, probably anticipating I'd say or do something. I relaxed. These folks had given a lot of money to be here. The least I could do was not kill them before they were killed in the game. I made a mental note to have a little chat about respect with him later. A long chat that included death threats.

  Wren Gable looked at the girls anxiously. "Oh! Well! I guess this is a Girl Scout event, Thad," she jittered as she fiddled with some period bangles on her wrist.

  Dressed as a well-to-do couple from the '50s, Thad wore a three-piece suit, while Wren was dressed in a dull gray with matching pumps and purse. She tugged nervously on her gloves. Wren was the very definition of a mousy wife. According to my research, no one believed that she was completely clueless about Thad's wandering eye. And yet she never left the man…never even threatened such a thing. Maybe I should have a chat with her too. A long chat with instructions on waterboarding your husband.

  Without wasting any more time, Thad breezed past to the liquor tray and poured himself a glass of what looked to be whiskey. Wren fluttered near him as if waiting for permission to sit.

  "These may not be the best role models for the girls," I whispered to Soo Jin.

  "We can use this as a teaching moment then," she said brightly.

  Right. Girls, don't be like Wren, and don't marry a Thad. And never, ever date a Dennis. That summed things up.

  A grim-looking middle-aged woman entered the room, wearing an unfortunately fitted black dress, ballet flats, and a frown. With short hair and a serious gaze, Dr. Caroline Regent looked like she'd much rather be elbow deep in a patient's intestines. The woman had a brilliant reputation as a surgeon but turned out to be a social dud. My research indicated that, from time to time, she attended galas, but they weren't really her thing, and she rarely talked to anyone.

  Dr. Regent had recently pioneered an experimental bowel bypass using snakeskin, making a name for herself nationwide. Unlike Thad, who liked the publicity, Caroline ignored it and spent almost all her time in surgery. I couldn't help but wonder why she was even here.

  "Oh! Arthur! Look at the little girls!" An elderly woman with a warm grin came through the door with an equally elderly man.

  "This is great!" Arthur smiled at my troop. "I love being around children!"

  Arthur and Violet Kasinski were in their late 70s and came from old money. Arthur's grandfather was the first pork producer in the area, a long time ago, and Arthur had built a vast fortune in the hog industry.

  The couple were famous for their love of children and were thought to be the nicest people in Iowa. Legendarily generous, the couple had never been able to have kids of their own, so they gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to charities like the Girl Scouts and Boys & Girls of Iowa, among other groups. The two of them were known to be very much in love, still doting on each other like they had when they'd first married. They were the couple everyone wanted to grow up to be.

  Arthur and Violet came right over and introduced themselves, asking each girl her name and being delighted by the answer. Arthur rewarded each girl with a cellophane-wrapped butterscotch disk. The girls politely thanked him but didn't seem very sure about what it was. I'd be willing to bet they'd never seen hard candy before. I gave them a quick nod. Betty unwrapped the candy and popped it into her mouth. The smile on her face told the other girls the candy was okay.

  Soo Jin and I introduced ourselves last.

  "You are so lucky." Violet beamed. "To get to work with kids! I wish I were younger—I'd be a Scout leader every year."

  I wanted to say that they might rethink that if they had my troop, but Soo Jin beat me to the punch with a sweet thank-you.

  Arthur then reached into his pocket and handed each girl a candy bar. This was familiar territory
, and the girls tore into them, thanking them through mouthfuls of chocolate, which amused the older couple and horrified the Gables.

  Dennis still hadn't acknowledged the fact that there were others in the room.

  The last two people through the door, weren't a couple at all. Taylor Burke was forty, just making Iowa's 40 Under 40 last year before aging out of the award. Petite and imposing, Taylor was the first female CEO of a major insurance company, headquartered in Des Moines. Known to be sharp and very ambitious, she was often called the Dragon Lady of Double Indemnity (whatever that meant). I liked what I'd read about her, especially the part where she'd been a Bronze, Silver, and Gold Award winner when she was a Girl Scout. The only reservation I had was that Taylor was rumored to be Thad's latest fling.

  "This is nice," she said as she took in the room, wearing a very red, very expensive vintage designer coat dress. After spotting the girls, she grinned. "And we have real Girl Scouts!" The woman bent down to Betty. "You know what? I was once a Girl Scout too! The youngest Gold Award winner in the state of Iowa."

  She said it in a way that complimented herself while insulting us. It was all in her inflection. Most people don't realize how dangerous that can be. In my experience, you had to be careful who you passive-aggressively complimented. You might get away with it with most people, but occasionally you came across a paranoid Lithuanian strongman who thought "have a nice day" was an invitation to a firefight. That's when you're glad you chose to attend his garden party armed with a very, very large handgun. I escaped only because his pet wolf distracted everyone by coughing up a human femur.

  Betty must have been suspicious of Taylor's words, because she gave me a cautious look. I nodded, indicating it was okay to respond.

  "Okay," the girl said, unimpressed.

  Ava, my somewhat bossier Scout, piped up, "That's what I want to be! I want to be the youngest Gold Award winner in the US."