Traveling Town Cozy Mystery Box Set Read online

  With the number of guests and the efficiency in which Chapman worked before sending a person Ella and Will’s way, it was impossible to get detailed accounts from every person, but he’d told them to get the gist of people’s whereabouts, movements, and anything suspicious they had seen between 7:10-7:20—especially if it pertained to the victim. Once finished with their interview, the attendee was free to leave.

  As the partygoers awaited their turn, most seemed giddy, albeit horrified, that a murder had happened in the same building as them. It made for juicy conversation that buzzed through the air. However, an hour later, the excitement had fizzled out, and the crowd grew restless, upset that their perfectly fun evening had been spoiled.

  Meanwhile, Rose enlisted help from a couple of ladies she played Bridge with, and they wound through the hallways and rooms, offering refreshments.

  As the night wore on and the clock struck another hour and the hour after that, Ella’s feet ached, despite the fact that she’d long ago kicked off Rose’s borrowed heels, opting to go barefoot.

  As she was glimpsing the end of the line off to her right, her least favorite person approached.

  Patience stood before her, rubbing the black ink from her fingertips along her apron. She glared at Ella with equal parts disdain and fear.

  To Ella’s right, Will was still interviewing Lou, so she couldn’t pawn the Protestant off onto him.

  Patience moved to step around Ella, but Ella quickly slid into her path.

  “None shall pass,” she said in her best Gandalf impersonation. “But seriously,” she added, dropping the act, “if you want to leave, you have to answer my questions.”

  Her pen poised over the notepad, waiting. “Now, where were you between 7:10 and 7:20?”

  Patience looked to the side, and her hands dropped to her heavy wool skirt, worrying the linen apron with her fingers. Tipping her head, she indicated the study.

  Ella made a note. “You were in the study the entire time?” Her breath hitched, hoping to catch the councilwoman in a lie.

  “Y-yes.”

  “Really?”

  Patience tipped up her chin and said more confidently, “Yes.”

  “Were you with anyone else?”

  The councilwoman opened her mouth, hesitated, then closed it. She shook her head.

  “You didn’t, say, go to the dining room after that?”

  Patience’s eyes widened. “Thou was following me?”

  “Not intentionally.”

  “If thou knowest, then why not spake it?”

  “Maybe I wanted to see if you’d tell the truth.” Ella narrowed her eyes. “What happened after you entered the dining room?”

  “Nothing.” The word came out too fast. Patience’s hands were now wringing her apron as if it were sopping wet. “Speaketh to that barber if you must. I have no answers for thee.”

  “Are you saying Sal is your alibi?” The corners of Ella’s mouth turned down. Had Sal been in the dining room also? She hadn’t seen him. Then again, she hadn’t had a full view of the interior when she’d walked past, and she had heard others inside. “Why did you go to the basement?”

  “Mine ears heard that sorrowful song when I stepped foot into the hall, and I searched it out.” Her face tilted, meeting Ella with a fiery gaze. “It is fortunate that I had, otherwise I would not have witnessed thee murdering that man.”

  Ella rolled her eyes then made notes, leaving out the accusation and putting extra question marks next to Patience’s name, her own annotation for the validity of the woman’s statement.

  A half hour later, after the last person walked out the front door, Ella collapsed onto the lowest step of the grand staircase, plopping her notebook of scribbles beside her.

  “I’m too tired to move. Someone help me upstairs. Flo? You look like you could use a good workout. Or five.”

  “Eat poop.”

  “Very mature of you.”

  The others seemed just as exhausted. Rose leaned on the check-in desk, or rather, the desk was propping her up. Around her, several empty bottles of booze littered the surface, mixed amongst pads of black ink and stacks of paper full of fingerprints labeled with names. The appetizer tray in front of her was nothing but silver and crumbs which Ella found disappointing since she hadn’t eaten for several hours. Her stomach rumbled as if to remind her of her negligence.

  “Hey,” Flo said from one of the fold-up chairs Jimmy had dragged up from the basement for the party, “who was the killer?”

  Wink turned an exhausted glare on her best friend. “Have you lost your marbles? That’s what we’ve spent the last couple of hours trying to figure out.”

  Will, who reclined in a chair across from Ella, stretched his legs, his eyes half-closed. “You might want to lay off all the hair products, Flo. I think they are damaging your brain.”

  “You’re assuming there’s a brain there to damage,” Ella said.

  Flo picked up a piece of broccoli from someone’s discarded plate and lobbed it at Ella. It landed with a thump on the step above her head.

  “Mm, thanks.” Ella popped the vegetable into her mouth before the others could protest.

  “Honestly,” Rose said, “sometimes, I think you were raised by vultures.”

  Flo wiggled on her seat in order to lean forward. “Can we get back to my question? I meant, in the game. Who was the killer in the game?”

  Rose picked at a hunk of food that had gotten trapped in the fringe around her dress. “Oh, that. It was Charles, ironically.”

  Flo deflated. “Just who I suspected.”

  “No you didn’t,” Wink said. “You thought it was Will.”

  Will’s head perked up. “Did you really?” A wry smile spread across his face, and he affected that questionable accent from earlier. “Was it the accent?”

  Sheriff Chapman’s chair creaked as he let out a groan and stood. “I think it’s time I leave.” He massaged his knees before picking up his discarded hat from a nearby chair. “Rose, Jimmy, don’t let anyone go into the basement. I may want to go back down and look around some more. After that, I’ll send someone to clean up before you can use it again.”

  Both innkeepers nodded.

  Earlier, Pauline and a couple of volunteers had hauled off the body, discreetly using the back entrance.

  Ella sighed. “Guess that means I won’t be doing laundry anytime soon.” She quickly added, “I mean, not that someone being murdered in the basement’s not a higher priority. Because it is.”

  Will peeled an eye open. “Why do you sound disappointed? Don’t you hate doing laundry?”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t mean I don’t.”

  Flo sniffed. “The smell downwind suggests otherwise.”

  On that note, Ella decided it was time for bed. After a chorus of goodnights, she managed to make it to her room before she collapsed onto her four-poster bed, narrowly missing a mound of long fur.

  “Sorry, Fluffy.” Her pillow muffled the words, but his purr suggested he understood the sentiment.

  The ginormous Maine Coon made a chirruping sound and butted his head against her arm. With great effort, Ella rolled onto her side and absently stroked his fur. Now that she was alone and could process the evening’s events, her mind drifted to Charles.

  The armor of humor she used to cope through stress dissolved and left her feeling hollow. A man had died. Alone. And shot in the back, no less. Such a cowardly act. Murder born from violence, she could understand—not agree with—but there was reasoning to it, some primal behavior at work.

  However, to hide in the shadows and to shoot a man without looking him in the face, that implied the killer felt guilt over what they were doing. Had they felt regret after pulling the trigger? Remorse?

  Her eyes slid over to the stack of dossiers sitting on her nightstand. Charles’s file had been thin. Once his son had been stranded in time, ripped from the town, the man had been alone, with no other family or friends to speak of. She couldn’t decide i
f that was better or worse. Few would feel the sting of his death, yet how sorrowful these past few years must’ve been for him.

  No wonder the candidate had been all bitter frowns. A lonely death for a lonely man. What had been his final, fleeting thoughts as he felt life ebb from his body?

  No person, she decided, should part from this mortal world without knowing someone cared. Not a single one.

  Fluffy butted her hand, and she realized she’d stopped petting him. She resumed entwining her fingers in his soft fur. So, who would kill Charles in such a cowardly fashion?

  Also, there was that strange note to consider. Who had written it? Supposing Charles arrived punctually at 7:15, that meant the killer had shot him and left before Ella had come down. A five-minute window was enough time to drop the gun and flee up the stairs.

  At the moment, with none of the evidence linking to a suspect, she turned to motives. Immediately, she grasped at the mayoral race. Had someone taken out the competition? Wink hadn’t taken Charles seriously as a threat, but maybe someone else had. Still, was being mayor worth killing someone over?

  Snippets of that angry conversation she’d overheard between Patience and the victim shortly before he’d died echoed in her mind. She’d forgotten to mention it to Sheriff Chapman.

  Rolling over, she buried her nose into Fluffy’s long fur and pushed all thoughts of murder aside. It didn’t matter because Chapman would find the killer. Soon, he would get fingerprints from the gun, match them to one of the partygoers, and it would all be over. Justice would be served, and the town would be safe again.

  Chapter 4

  ELLA STEPPED OUT the front door early Saturday morning to a gray day. She bent into the chilly breeze and walked briskly through the front garden. Her boots crunched through patches of frozen snow—the stubborn remains of Christmas spent in a craggy, alp-like terrain. Fog swirled about the street, and moisture clung to her curls.

  The town had jumped shortly after Edwin left. Wherever this new location was, it was cold and held a constant, soupy fog so thick the sun never broke through. Oddly, it didn’t feel much warmer than the mountain location where they’d spent Christmas.

  However, it was warm enough to melt the several feet of accumulated snow. Unfortunately, this led to the lake rising and flooding in several areas of town, but brought a silver lining—for Ella, at least. With large swaths of snow abutted against the terrain of their new, snowless location, it was the perfect opportunity to finish mapping the boundary line, a project she’d struggled to make progress on due to logistics (being snowed in).

  The bell over the door in Grandma’s Kitchen gave a merry jingle as she stepped into the railcar diner next door to the inn. Shaking off the drizzle and chill, she unzipped her jacket and hung it in the kitchen on a hook.

  Her shoes squeaked across the vinyl floor as she walked over to the oven. Wink was pulling out freshly made cranberry scones, filling the room with their scent, while Horatio warmed the griddle.

  Ella mumbled a morning greeting to both of them before stumbling back into the diner for coffee. Some blessed saint—probably Wink—had already made a pot.

  After she’d fixed her cup and had taken several sips, she began to feel human again. She was pouring a second cup of mud when Wink strolled in. Her short pink hair was in pin curls, and she wore a bright lipstick to match.

  “What’s got your panties in a wad this morning?”

  Ella peered over her steaming cup at her boss. “What makes you think I’m wearing panties?”

  Wink shot her a wicked grin. “You want me to tell Will that? Might help things move faster between you two. If I had a man like that interested in me, we’d already be hitched and popping out babies.”

  Ella grimaced at the visual. “It’s not that simple.” The cup paused mid-air. “And if you’re going to poke around my love life, then let’s discuss Stewart.”

  Wink chuckled and pulled out the ledger beneath the register.

  “Wink? Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

  “Sure, dear.”

  “I know it’s none of my business, and you don’t have to answer, but why did you and Donald never have children?”

  Wink paused in her perusal of the yellowed pages and glanced up. “We wanted to, but we were never able to. We’d considered adopting, but the time came and went. Then, he got sick….”

  Ella regretted digging up the memories that now flitted across Wink’s expression. She drummed her black ink-stained fingers on the counter, searching for a new topic.

  Wiggling her fingertips in the air, she asked, “What’d Chapman use, permanent marker? I suppose it’s too late to ask if this ink’s nontoxic.”

  “I got most of mine out with a Brillo Pad and lemon juice.” Wink showed off her scouring skills, her fingers having only a slightly unnatural tint to them.

  “I still don’t see why he had to fingerprint us, too.”

  “After that stink Patience raised, I’m surprised he didn’t lock you up just to get her off his back.”

  Ella considered this as she sipped her coffee. The scent of the freshly made scones had meandered through the pass through, making her mouth water.

  Just then, a squirrel in a business suit leaped onto the counter, causing Ella to slosh some of her precious mud over the sides of the cup and swear.

  “Hello, Chester.” She kept a wary eye on him as his whiskers twitched back and forth like a kid hopped up on sugar. “A bolo tie?” she asked Wink. “What’s with his outfit?”

  “Why, to appeal to the constituents, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  The bell chimed with their first customer. Ella greeted an older couple and told them to sit anywhere.

  Wink’s hand perked up her hair. “How do I look?”

  “Like an extra in Grease.”

  Wink stared at her.

  “You look like you’re running for mayor,” Ella corrected, which seemed to satisfy her friend.

  After collecting Chester on her shoulder, Wink strolled forward, laughing as if the couple had just told a joke—they hadn’t—and began asking them about their morning in a sing-song voice that hurt Ella’s ears.

  The couple, particularly the female, seemed amused with Chester’s sartorial choice, particularly the bolo tie. She cooed at him and laughed when the varmint gobbled up a dried berry Wink had given her to feed him.

  “Suck up,” Ella muttered, watching the squirrel from her spot behind the lunch counter.

  She shook her head, knowing how much of the devil was in him. After topping off her coffee, she strode into the kitchen. Horatio looked up from a second batch of cranberry scones he was preparing.

  “It’s not even nine o’clock, and Wink’s already campaigning.” She reached for one of the baked pastries from the first batch.

  “I wouldn’t—”

  The tips of her fingers seared with pain, and she dropped the baked good with a clatter. She nursed her fingers in her mouth, still eyeing the scone and calculating how much time it would take to cool.

  “There are glazed donuts over there.” Horatio pointed with his spatula, which was virtually an extension of his hand. “Maybe you could put them in the display?”

  “Sure. I better test them to be sure they’re okay, though.” Ella rounded the island to the tray of donuts then popped one in her mouth. It flaked and melted, tasting of sugar and early mornings. Between her second and third bite, she asked the Italian how his toddler, Jack, was doing.

  His mouth quirked up in a grin. “He learned the whole list of signs you taught me last week.”

  “Really? That’s excellent. Remind me to teach you more.”

  Ella had been teaching the cook various signs of items in American Sign Language so he could teach his Deaf son. She was hoping to build up both parents’ vocabularies before they delved into grammar and more complex sentence structure since ASL syntax was different than that of English.

  After replenishing the donut dis
play up front with the freshly baked goods, she tended to a steady stream of customers for the next two hours. Their moods were split between hunger and excitement over the body that had been found at the inn.

  As usual, news through the small town had spread like a rash. Those who hadn’t attended the mystery dinner were getting various versions of the previous night’s events from other patrons. People milled about, flitting from booth to lunch counter, exchanging information and generally making walking with several plates full of food difficult.

  “You’d think Wink had just announced she was giving out free slices of her famous banana bread,” Ella said during a short reprieve in the kitchen. She guzzled a glass of water then dabbed at her forehead with a hand towel.

  Behind the fryer, Horatio pulled out a basket of sizzling, thick fries, his face glistening with sweat.

  She took advantage of the moment to make a quick call to Will via the rotary phone attached to the wall, setting up a time to meet with him so they could map the town together.

  It was something she could probably do herself, but she’d been through the forest enough times to know she wanted company—especially his. Also, his local knowledge would be a boon, ensuring she wouldn’t get lost or accidentally stranded.

  Once he found out she wasn’t roping him in for another run around the lake with her, he agreed. She could hear the strain in his voice when she told him what she wanted to do. In general, he didn’t disagree with the idea of mapping the town’s boundary line, but the topic was closely related to one they didn’t discuss, one that they usually ended up arguing about if it came up.

  She started to hang up. “Oh, wait. Will?”

  “Yes?”

  The phone cord wound around her body as she turned to see Horatio. The cook seemed too preoccupied with flipping burger patties to be listening in, especially given the loud sizzle from the grill and the soft Italian utterances streaming out of his mouth.

  “Do you still have your notebook of interview notes from last night or did Chapman take it?” She held her breath. The sheriff hadn’t confiscated hers yet, probably because he had his hands full sorting through the fingerprints, but she knew it was a matter of time before he asked for them.