Murder, Money, and Moving On Read online

  Murder, Money, and Moving On

  A Craft Circle Cozy Mystery

  Stacey Alabaster

  Fairfield Publishing

  Copyright © 2018 Fairfield Publishing

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the author.

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Thank You!

  1

  Thump, thump, thump.

  Most people are afraid of the things that go bump in the night. Especially things that make your whole bed shake.

  But when you live in an—allegedly—haunted house, then bumps in the middle of the night are par for the course. I just sighed, turned over, and went back to sleep. I’d been sold the house several years earlier, at a price that most people would term ‘a steal’. Tens of thousands of dollars cheaper than you would expect for a four-bedroom house sitting on the edge of the lake. Only later had I discovered a murder took place here. Still, I’d decided to stay and take my chances with the ghosts.

  Okay, my eyes were open. Why was my whole bed shaking?

  “Oh, Jasper,” I said, pulling off my eye-mask to see him banging his head into the side of the bed. A new habit he had formed to get my attention in the middle of the night. A bad habit. Jasper was a darling, really. A Border Collie, a rescue dog, and my best friend. But he could be naughty, difficult to train, and he always had his run of the house.

  I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror—frizzy blonde hair, even frizzier than usual, with bags under my eyes—and realized that my beauty sleep was far from over. But just as I pulled the mask back down, I noticed that my cell phone beside the bed was flashing, on silent. A call.

  I looked down at Jasper. “Did you know that, Jasper?” Maybe he wasn’t being so naughty after all. He was the most intelligent dog I’d ever met. But still, it would be mighty impressive to notice that my phone was ringing and to wake me up to alert me.

  The name that popped up on my phone was Lleyton Franklin, who owned the shop next door to my craft store. He sold knick-knacks and souvenirs. He was a strange guy who frequently stayed the night in his store, which was something no one could understand because he lived in a lovely home not far from mine.

  Jasper was already bouncing around and grabbing my slippers—probably because he wanted to go for a walk. I checked the red numbers on the clock. 3:30. No such luck, boy.

  I reached for the phone and wondered if I should answer. Lleyton and I weren’t friends—we really only interacted at the monthly business owners’ meetings where we paid dues and got lectured about who was using whose parking spots—so if Lleyton was calling at this time of night, or morning, it could only be due to an emergency.

  “Don’t tell me the shop has burnt down,” I said, only half-joking, once I had answered.

  “The opposite,” Lleyton replied gruffly. He didn’t sound any happier to be talking to me than I was to him.

  “The opposite?” In my groggy state, I had no idea what that possibly meant. “So, the shop is still fully standing then? Thanks for calling, Lleyton,” I said with a wry laugh, about to hang up. “I need my beauty sleep, you know.” Desperately.

  “The opposite as in, the shop is wet.”

  “Huh?”

  “A pipe burst out back, by the looks of it. The shop is filling up with water as I speak. I can see it now through your shop windows. You might want to get down here before it floods the whole street,” he said before slamming the receiver down.

  Oh boy.

  “Come on, Jasper,” I said, trying to make it sound fun and enticing. He was just happy he finally had a reason to grab my shoes for me. “Looks like we are going on a midnight adventure.”

  I thanked the plumber and he shrugged, saying I wouldn’t sound so grateful when I got the bill for the late-night emergency. He’d managed to stop the leak, but by then, a lot of damage had been done.

  As for the bill, well… “That’s a problem for next week’s George,” I told Jasper as I stepped inside to survey the damage. The burst pipe had been in the break room, away from the main part of the shop, but the water had reached the carpet before I had arrived. I didn’t so much care about the break room being wet; I cared about how much of our stock had been damaged. We couldn’t sell soaking wet yarn. I braced myself as I looked around. The water hadn’t quite reached the shelves, but there were puddles everywhere and if I didn’t work quickly to dry them, the floors were going to be ruined and we were going to get mold. I needed help. I needed to phone my assistant manager.

  Brenda was not picking up her phone. Not that surprising—she was the most loyal employee you could ever ask for, but she was also a sound sleeper, with no dog sleeping at the end of her bed to tell her she had a phone call.

  I hung up and grabbed the towels I kept in the back in case of emergency. There weren’t enough to mop up the water, but they would have to do for now.

  “Looks like we’re going to be stuck here for a while cleaning up…but you’ll be willing to lend a paw, won’t you, Jasper?”

  He just gave me a little shrug and laid down on the floor to play with his chew toy. It squeaked at me while I threw a dry towel into a puddle. It was like trying to soak up the ocean. I tried Brenda’s number one more time, needing her to bring me a proper mop and bucket, but then decided to just give up when it rang twenty times with no answer. Then I started to hear what sounded like a ring tone coming from somewhere inside the shop. “She probably just left her cell phone in the shop somewhere,” I muttered, shaking my head. No wonder she wasn’t picking up!

  I decided to make the most of it and turned on some tunes while I cleaned. I chose a radio station that played golden hits from the 60s and 70s all through the night and almost yelped with joy when I found a rusty mop and bucket in the back. Must have belonged to the previous owner. I wheeled it out and began to spin around, singing out loud to a Steely Dan classic as I went. Yes, it was rusty, but it did the job, and soon I had taken care of at least half the puddles. I looked at the time. Just past 4:30. We’d be opening for business in just a few hours.

  It was a cool night, so I turned on the heater and turned the vents toward the carpets in the back. “Oh, Brenda is not going to be happy about that,” I said, looking up at the ceiling when I felt a drop of something wet coming down from up above. At first, I’d assumed it was the broken pipe, that the plumber had done an average job. But it was raining lightly outside and there was a slight leak from the roof. Drip. Drip. Drip.

  I sighed. “Also a problem for Next Week’s George,” I said, shaking my head. I might have to tell Brenda to wear a rainhat inside.

  The music was blaring so loudly that it almost obscured the thudding of the door. Thump, thump, thump. I jumped when I turned around after a particularly loud bang. It wasn’t just raining outside, it was windy. Apparently, I hadn’t shut the front door all the way when I came in and it had blown open then slammed shut again. With this weather, I wasn’t looking forward to the walk home.

  Jasper barked. I walked to the front door and shut it properly, thanking him for being so vigilant. “I don’t remember le
aving that open,” I said, feeling a little unsettled for a moment before I shook it off. “I guess I was just in a rush to survey the damage.” Jasper stuck out his tongue and proudly wagged his tail. I leaned down to pet him.

  “I don’t know what I would do without you, Jasper.”

  They do say that dogs are a woman’s best friend, but Jasper and I really took that to a new level. Whether it was at work, at home, or investigating Pottsville’s latest murder, Jasper was always by my side. Yes, he had a naughty steak, but he was often the voice—or bark—of reason. Taking him home from the shelter two years earlier had been the best decision of my life.

  But he had been barking a lot at nothing recently. I tried to soothe him to get him to calm down. Just the day before, Jasper had been at the front door, barking at some invisible thing. Maybe he had been barking at ghosts. Maybe he saw things I didn’t. Either way, sometimes I did need some peace and quiet.

  I returned to my mopping. “Oh, what now?”

  Not content with barking at the front door, Jasper was barking frantically at something in the back this time. Not another ghost, I thought, and ignored him at first. 5:00. I needed to get this water cleaned up.

  He was desperate for me to pay attention, doing that little anxious jiggle he did when he wanted me to look at something. He stood at the door to a room I seldom used. What did I even keep in there?

  Yap, yap. “Believe me, Jasper, I’ve seen it,” I said, thinking he was yapping at the dripping roof. The rain had eased up. “And I have no desire to see the damage again until I’ve had a little more rest…and some coffee. Perhaps it will be magically gone by then and you can stop barking.”

  But he still didn’t stop.

  “Gosh, maybe the damp has attracted the rats or something,” I said, finally agreeing to go look and grabbing a broomstick on my way.

  I flicked on the light switch against my better judgement, with all the water around. “See, Jasper? There is nothing to—” I stopped talking and felt all of the blood drain from my face. I caught sight of my face in the mirror behind the sink. Now it was me who looked like the ghost.

  And I wasn’t the only one who looked dead.

  So did Lleyton. Bald, on the ground, and completely dead.

  2

  “I have no idea how he could have fallen through my roof.”

  There were heavy drops of rain hitting my cheeks, but I was in no hurry to go back inside the store.

  Ryan stopped taking notes and raised his eyebrows, looking up at the roof, where there were missing shingles and a hole big enough to fit a man. He was tall enough to get a good view. I’m fairly tall myself, but still, all I could see were the shingles that had slid down to the gutters with the leaves, about to tumble off.

  “I think I can see how he fell through.” Well, yes. There was a hole.

  “Well, I don’t know how that hole got there,” I replied honestly. I shifted from one foot to the other. “Last time I looked, it was just a crack.” Or maybe it had just been a crack that was hiding a giant crater on the other side.

  Ryan looked a little skeptical about that. I knew what he was thinking, though. Ryan and I had been seeing each other, on and off, pretty much since I’d arrived in Pottsville two years earlier. He was cute. He was a cop. He was kind, and funny. You’re probably wondering what the ‘but’ is here. Well, the but is that Ryan was in his late twenties and I had just turned forty. I truly believe that age is nothing but a number. I just wasn’t sure that Ryan felt the same way. Which was funny, because in many ways, he was older and more responsible that I was. He had been telling me to look at my roof and gutters for months. And he wasn’t the only one.

  “I don’t know what he was doing on my roof,” I said, changing gears slightly. “But I know he wasn’t happy when he called me to tell me that the shop had flooded. He seemed to think it was my fault. That it was somehow due to my negligence.”

  To his credit, Ryan managed to bite his tongue this time.

  “You really have no idea what he could have been doing up there?”

  “I suppose he was poking around up there. Spying. Maybe he was just checking to make sure I actually got the broken pipe fixed.” I shrugged a little. “Maybe he was a creep. Maybe he dug that hole up there himself.”

  “He wasn’t a dog, George.”

  “Well, if he accidentally slipped and fell, that’s not my fault, is it?” I asked. “He should have been more careful, up there at his age.”

  Ryan stared at me. “He was forty-three.”

  Only two years older than me.

  I crossed my arms. “Still, I stand by what I said.”

  Ryan sighed and put his pen away. Then he lowered his voice. There were two other cops there about fifteen feet away from us, interviewing other witnesses, neighbors who had been out and about on an early morning stroll. He didn’t want the other cops to hear what he was about to say. “The evidence points to Lleyton being pushed, George. There was someone else up on the roof there tonight.”

  I could feel my eyes grow wide. A shiver ran down my spine. “Someone murdered Lleyton?”

  Ryan nodded. “But keep that to yourself, George, okay?”

  I gulped and nodded as he walked away.

  There was a second person on the roof that night? I looked down at Jasper and wondered. “Did you hear a second set of footsteps, boy?” I asked, pausing for an answer. Sure, I knew that Jasper couldn’t speak English, but he could at least shake his head or nod for yes and no.

  But I got nothing. Nada.

  “If I only I hadn’t had the music up so loudly,” I tutted at myself, annoyed. I was the only witness and I’d been too busy singing and dancing. Ryan had allowed me to go back into the shop to collect my things. He was waiting in the car outside to make sure I left promptly. That was fine for me. The shop would have to close for the next day or so.

  “We’ve got to get to work, Jasper,” I said. “Come on, let’s go home.”

  I had a process I always started with when there had been a murder. Maybe it was just the fact that I lived in an—allegedly—haunted house, but these things seemed to draw themselves to me. By now, I had the process down pat.

  I lived in a house that was mostly glass windows and doors, which made it look as though you could walk straight from my living room right into the lake. Except when the sun hit it right and I could see my own reflection. But sometimes, it was eerily still and it didn’t look like there was any glass there at all. I pulled out the dry erase board that I kept off to the side of the living room and placed it front and center, telling Jasper to sit. I always needed his second opinion on things. Sometimes his first.

  I am an artist. Well, kind of. Can you call yourself an artist if you don’t make any money from it? I did the next best thing of course, selling arts and craft supplies so that other people could make art. And I did enjoy working at my shop. I just would have preferred, in an ideal world, to do nothing but make things all the time. I loved making beaded jewelry, and I loved to draw, to sketch. Murders always gave me the perfect opportunity, because where there are murders, there are suspects.

  I took the cap off my marker and poised it above the white of the board, ready to sketch the face of my first suspect. “Erm,” I said, suddenly stopping.

  Jasper cocked his head to the side. He was waiting for me to do something as well.

  I looked down at him. “Huh,” I said. “I suppose we need a suspect first, don’t we?”

  Jasper gave me a “I don’t know what I am going to do with you look” and got down on his belly, looking sleepy. Who did I know who would want to harm Lleyton? He wasn’t the most popular guy in Pottsville, at least not in our neighborhood, but that was only because he was always grumbling about what everyone else was doing and blaming them for everything that was going wrong with his own business. For instance, he thought that the reason no one was coming into his souvenir shop was because they were getting scared off by Jasper barking at them. Well, you know, may
be he had a point there. But my counter-argument would have been that my store had no problem attracting customers and Jasper was right there inside. Still, Lleyton had always had something to say about everyone.

  I turned and looked at the board. Maybe I needed to sketch my own face up there. “Time to call it a night, I think.” I looked the clock and saw that it was now 6:30. Not so much a night as a morning.

  But sleep was not meant to find me that morning. No sooner had I put my mask back on then my phone rang again. I knew it had because Jasper was once again butting his head into the side of my bed to alert me.

  “Not again,” I grumbled, feeling a sense of déjà vu wash over me. This time, the call was from a man called Les. He owned the shop on the other side of me, a fishing and tackle supply shop. Not a place I ever had any cause to visit as I would pretty much rather die than go fishing.

  “Can’t this wait?” I asked. “It’s been a big night and—”

  “I know. I need to speak to you,” he said. “You need to get down to the shop now.”

  I rolled over and reached for Jasper’s lead. He was already fetching my shoes.

  I’d expected Les to be waiting for me, with his curly red hair and burly body that made him look rather buff for his age (early fifties). But I hadn’t expected him to have a gang waiting there with him. As I got closer to the shop, with the sun rising behind me, I started to realize that he had collected half the people from the neighborhood. Just about everyone who owned a shop on the street was there. And they were all staring at me with their arms crossed and angry looks on their faces.