Apple Orchard Cozy Mystery series Box Set 1

by Chelsea Thomas

  Teeny began to whisper-shout. “Please. Blurt! You have to blurt, it’s no fun if you don’t blurt,” Teeny sat on the edge of her seat. Then she got quieter and said, “I bet it was about money! Someone in his family did it!” Teeny had no problem with baseless accusations. Or clearly, with blurting.

  “I don’t know,” Miss May took a sip of water. “Vinny rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. It could have been anyone.”

  Teeny turned to me. “You found the body. What do you think?”

  Honestly? Vinny’s death didn’t seem like an accident to me. There were too many people who hated Vinny for him to die via an unfortunate slip-and-fall on the night before his wedding. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to encourage Teeny. She was already looking like a bloodhound on the scent.

  I took a deep breath. “The police report said it was an accident, so it was an accident. That’s that.”

  “Oh, that’s not that!” Teeny smacked the table, exasperated. “That’s nothing. The Pine Grove Police are always wrong. Remember when they ticketed KP for running that stop sign he hates?”

  “But he did run the stop sign,” I said. “He admitted it.”

  “Whose side are you on?” Teeny shook her head.

  Miss May laughed. Normally, I would’ve laughed with her. KP’s notorious hatred for stop signs was one of his more ridiculous quirks. But I couldn’t even muster a chuckle.

  I knew it would be much simpler to just accept that Vinny’s death was an accident. It was so much easier to go with the official police report than to dive down the proverbial rabbit hole, but Miss May wouldn’t drop it.

  “I know you don’t think it was an accident.” Once again, Miss May scrutinized my face. “Do you?”

  “I do too!” There I was, yelling again. Why had I suddenly found myself incapable of controlling the volume of my voice?

  A nice old man in the booth behind us turned and looked at me like I had just tickled his neck.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll keep it down.”

  “Eat your pancakes, Humphrey!” Teeny never let a slight go unnoticed.

  The old man turned back and re-focused his attention on his pancakes.

  “I know you hate the Pine Grove PD,” I said. “But I have confidence they—”

  “Please,” Teeny finished her pie and pulled my plate toward her. “The whole force spends most of the day walking in circles, trying to get their ten thousand steps.”

  Miss May laughed.

  “I’m not kidding,” Teeny took a bite of my pie. “I saw the whole squad in the park last week. I said ‘What are you boys doing out here? No crimes to solve?’ That’s when I noticed they were all wearing those SmartFits on their hairy little wrists. Getting their steps. Unbelievable. This hot new Wayne guy sounds like the only decent cop they’ve got.”

  “What were you doing in the park?” Miss May asked.

  “Getting my ten thousand steps.”

  We laughed. Teeny shrugged, “It’s OK for me. I’m not supposed to be out there solving crimes.”

  “Unless you are,” Miss May said. “We may have a mystery on our hands. Right, Chelsea?”

  “No. No, no, no. We are not supposed to be ‘out there solving crimes,’” I said. “I can’t solve a Sudoku, let alone a murder! And if it’s true, if somebody killed Vinny, what then? What if they try to kill one of us?”

  “Sudokus are hard,” Teeny said.

  Miss May sat back, as if I had just said something important. “So you think it’s a murder.”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t say that.”

  Miss May leaned forward. “…but.”

  “I guess… something felt off when I discovered the body. But I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “Yes, you can,” Miss May said. “If you stop and really think about it.”

  I didn’t waste my breath protesting. Miss May was right. I had done everything I could to push the moment I had discovered Vinny’s body out of my brain. Earlier in the morning, I had even sung the Barney song over and over just to occupy my mind with something happy.

  “You’ve got that big brain,” Miss May said. “You might as well use it for something.”

  That “big brain” trick was the same tactic Miss May had used to get me to study for the SATs in high school. At first, I had brushed her off. But then I had applied myself, studied hard, and almost gotten a perfect score.

  At the time, I didn’t think it mattered, but that test score got me into Duke University. Duke led me to my love for art history, which brought me to my love for interior design. And I met some of my best friends at that school.

  Sadly, Duke was a bit of a bubble. Life there was safe. Everyone was smart, everyone could be trusted, and everyone wanted to be your friend. So when I got out into the real world... let's just say I wasn't prepared for how hard it would be.

  In some ways, I thought of moving back with Miss May as my graduate education in the subject of life. Miss May never let people take advantage of her. She was great with money. She was an expert communicator. And she was fearless. Like I wanted to be.

  I looked up at Miss May and Teeny, who were waiting for my reply. If I didn’t take this chance, everything would stay the same. But if I were brave enough to try, I might grow. Or learn.

  All those thoughts hit me at once. And they hit me hard.

  “OK,” I said. “Let me think about what I saw.”

  Teeny clapped her hands and lit up like a tiny blonde Christmas tree. Miss May put a hand on Teeny’s arm to settle her down.

  I flipped over my paper placemat. “Do either you have a pen?”

  Teeny and Miss May checked their pockets, but no dice. Then Humphrey turned around and reached his gnarled old hand into our booth, offering a chewed-up pencil.

  I hesitated, then took the number two from between the old man’s fingers. “Thanks, Humphrey.” He gave me a thumbs-up.

  Then I started drawing. As an interior designer, I always sketched out my ideas by hand. I loved drawing, and I found that I thought better while drawing than speaking or writing.

  That day at Grandma’s, I started with broad strokes as I tried to remember everything about the scene of the crime.

  The brook was almost ten feet across, so I penciled its edges on the placemat. Then, I sketched out Vinny’s body. OK, I sketched out a human-shaped blob. I was used to drawing rooms and furniture and lamps, not people.

  Teeny noticed. “Is that supposed to be Vinny?” she asked. “I mean, I know he wasn’t the nicest guy, but you don’t have to give him a snowman body.”

  Miss May noticed something different, “You put him in the middle of the brook.”

  “Yeah.” I kept drawing. “That’s where he was.”

  Miss May cocked her head, “That means if he was indeed on a drunken stroll, like the police report says, he walked out into the water before he fell and hit his head. Isn't that odd?”

  “He was stupid,” Teeny said. “Sorry. I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. But he was dumb. Vinny was dumb. And greasy. OK. I’m done.”

  I kept my attention on my placemat, sketching in the flask that Vinny had been holding.

  Miss May looked at my drawing of the flask, narrowing her eyes. “And he still had the flask in his hand when you found him?”

  I nodded. “Yup.”

  Miss May raised her eyebrows. “That’s strange, isn’t it? You’d think if he fell, he would have dropped the flask.”

  “Definitely.” Teeny scraped up some crumbs off her plate. “If I so much as stumble when I’m carrying a tray full of food, that’s it. Food’s flying everywhere. I once stubbed my toe and dropped an entire bowl of soup on the new mayor. What a waste of soup.”

  “You two are right,” I said. “I didn’t even notice that. But it’s almost like… somebody put the flask in Vinny’s hand. So the cops would be sure to think Vinny had been drinking.”

  Miss May and Teeny raised their eyebrows and exchanged a look.

  Ne
xt, I drew seven big rocks that stretched across the brook. I didn’t have to think hard to remember those rocks. I used to skip across them when I was a kid, pretending that the creek was molten lava. And I would count the rocks as I jumped, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.”

  But when I looked down at the placemat, I realized… something was off about the rocks. I looked at my drawing and counted the rocks, pointing to each one to keep everything straight.

  “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven… eight?”

  I had drawn an extra rock, wedged into the silt near the brook’s edge. It was smaller than the other rocks — most of which were at least two feet wide — and I had filled it in with the pencil, so it was dark black. I hadn’t even realized what I was doing. My brain had been on design autopilot, and I had drawn the mysterious eighth rock from memory without noticing. But at that moment, it was all I could see.

  Most of the rocks in the brook were sedimentary. Big and gray. They had been there for a thousand years.

  But this extra rock was deep black. I had used dark stones like it many times when Mike and I did “outdoor spaces” for our clients in Manhattan. Come to think of it, I used a similar rock in gardens like the ones Miss May hired us to install by the cabins. And I knew exactly what kind of rock it was.

  “Holy crap!” I pointed at the small black rock I had drawn. “It’s basalt!”

  Teeny and Miss May looked at me with empty expressions. They did not appreciate the magnitude of my geological revelation.

  “Basalt is what I used to landscape the cabins,” I pointed at the drawing again. “But it would never be in the creek naturally. It’s volcanic!”

  Teeny gasped, like she was having a moment of immense understanding. Then she said, “Wait. What does that mean?”

  I smiled. I knew I shouldn’t be gloating about somebody being murdered, but still. I had just figured out a major clue, and I felt good.

  “What’s the significance of the rock?!” Teeny demanded.

  I leaned forward.

  “I think it’s the murder weapon.”

  9

  Return to the Scene

  The back of Miss May’s yellow VW Bus was set up like a classic 70’s kitchenette, with a little blue booth near the window, an art-deco fridge, and a tiny stove with a hot plate for whipping up decadent hot chocolate.

  Miss May sold her baked goods at fairs and farmers’ markets right out of the kitchenette, and people loved it. Often a line of fifty or more people waited to have a cup of coffee in the bus. And sometimes the wait lasted for hours.

  Miss May also rented out the bus as a photo-booth during parties, and it had even been the special “wedding carriage” for several couples who had gotten married in Pine Grove.

  In nearby towns like Scarsdale or Chappaqua, newly married couples rode away from their weddings in fancy limos or Rolls Royces. But the people of Pine Grove valued personality over luxury. That’s part of what I loved about my hometown, and I found it refreshing after living in the city for so long.

  I loved the kitchenette in Aunt May’s bus more than most people, because it was one of the first spaces I ever helped design.

  True to her “happiness comes from hard work” mantra, Miss May set me to work on the kitchenette a mere two weeks after my parents passed.

  “This bus,” she had said, “can be more than a car. It can be a kitchen-on-wheels. And I want you to help me design it.”

  Miss May had let me pick out the color scheme and the furniture, and she had stuck with the same general aesthetic whenever she replaced an item or appliance over the years. I hadn’t realized it as a grieving thirteen-year-old girl, but designing the kitchenette had transformed my whole life. The experience gave me purpose and validation, and I knew I could never repay Miss May for that great act of generosity.

  As we exited Grandma’s and headed toward Miss May’s van, Teeny insisted that I sit back in the kitchenette with her for the short trip from the restaurant up to the farm.

  Although I loved the kitchenette, I hated riding in back of the van. Too bumpy for someone as prone to spontaneous nausea as I. So I hesitated.

  “I don’t know. It’s so bumpy back there. And I’m already a nervous passenger.”

  Miss May climbed behind the wheel. “There’s an understatement.”

  “Oh, hush up, May.” Teeny ushered me toward the back of the bus with a little wave. “C’mon. I wanna chat!”

  Teeny hated riding in the back alone, and as she stood there, looking all hopeful and sweet, I couldn’t say no. So I slid into the little booth, determined to brave the nausea-inducing bumps, and Teeny followed me inside.

  The moment we exited the parking lot, Teeny jumped up and started putzing around the kitchenette. First, she helped herself to a pre-packaged slice of apple pie from the fridge. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee and settled back across from me at the booth.

  “Let's have pie,” Teeny said.

  “We ate pie five minutes ago.”

  Teeny shrugged. “So what?”

  It was hard to argue with that logic, and I was a little hungry, so I grabbed a slice of my own.

  I selected the perfect bite, but the bus thumped, so I missed my mouth and stabbed my shoulder with pie. Have I mentioned that I'm graceful like a ballerina?

  Teeny would have laughed if she’d seen me, but her eyes were closed in a moment of bliss as she enjoyed Miss May's pie.

  “This is so good, May.” Teeny opened her eyes. “Is it too late to order a couple dozen pies for the restaurant next week?”

  “Nope,” Miss May called back. “You know you’ve got a standing order.”

  “Yeah, but I want some extras. Maybe a couple just for me too?”

  Miss May laughed and shook her head. “I’m not gonna forget your personal stash. Don’t worry.”

  My pie almost slid off the table as Miss May rumbled up Whitehill Road toward the farm. Whitehill was steep and pothole-ridden, and the orchard sat perched at the top. That meant our farm offered the best views in the county. But it also meant that every time we came home from town, my ears popped. And the bus rumbled so loud it drowned out my thoughts.

  Somehow, Teeny sipped her coffee with grace as we lurched up the hill, not even noticing as we bounced up and down. ”So,” she sipped. “Let’s talk suspects.”

  “What?” I had to shout over the sound of the bus.

  “Suspects!”

  “Car wrecks? All the time on this road!”

  “No,” Teeny said. “Suspects!”

  “We’re here,” Miss May said as she pulled into the farm.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Five more seconds on that hill, and I would’ve puked pie all over the kitchenette.

  ----

  As Miss May, Teeny, and I strolled down KP’s walk out to where I found the body, the peacefulness of the farm struck me.

  The previous night, the orchard had looked like one of Miss May’s crime shows. All grim faces and police tape. Hushed voices and handsome cops. And, of course, Flanagan, the walking shampoo commercial.

  But at that moment, only twelve hours later, the sun smiled. Big, puffy clouds pillowed behind the hills. And birds chirped their songs like nothing bad had ever happened, and nothing bad would ever happen again.

  I even heard a couple laughing in the apple orchard, out near the Granny Smiths.

  At first, I thought nothing of it. It was a Saturday in October. At that time of year, visitors packed the farm from morning 'til night. But word had gotten out about Vinny’s death, so I’d expected the farm to be empty that day.

  “I’m surprised anyone came out for apples today,” I said.

  “Me too,” Miss May turned her ear toward the sound. “It's extremely surprising, actually. The orchards and the bake shop are closed all day, out of respect.”

  I had woken up late that day and hopped right into the bus to go to Grandma’s, so I had given no thought to whether the farm was open. But it made sense tha
t Miss May closed down. My aunt loved doing business, but she never let her financial savvy get in the way of doing the right thing.

  “Who’s out there then?” Teeny stood on her tippy toes and looked out toward the apple trees.

  “Maybe a guest from the wedding,” I said.

  “They’re laughing an awful lot,” Miss May said.

  Without talking about it, all three of us gravitated toward the laughter, our curiosity a magnetic force, drawing us toward the mysterious sound.

  We took a winding path as we searched for the laughers. The orchard contained over a thousand trees, so sound carried and bounced in every direction. At first, I would have sworn that the laughter was near us, somewhere among the Granny Smiths. But we trekked all the way through the sour green apples, and the sound somehow got further away.

  We trudged all the way back through the high grass near the trees, when the sound got louder again.

  I stopped walking and listened. “It’s coming from the Christmas trees.” I marched toward the patch of evergreens adjacent to the orchard, the “fir” in Fruit & Fir Farm.

  The sound got louder, and I picked up the pace, nearly tripping as I hurried through the high grass.

  “Wait up,” Teeny called after me. I looked back and saw that Miss May and Teeny had fallen behind. But I didn’t stop walking.

  I was about to enter the evergreen patch when Miss May called out in a worried tone. “Chelsea! Wait!”

  I remembered that tone. When I was a kid, Miss May had only used it in the most dire circumstances. So I slowed down, waited, and listened. One voice belonged to a man, and the other belonged to a woman. They were both laughing and talking, and it sounded like they were old friends, catching up after years apart. Just two lovebirds who drove up from the city and took a walk through the orchard.

  Finally, Miss May and Teeny caught up.

  “OK,” Miss May stopped for a few seconds to catch her breath. “Let’s go.”

  Miss May stepped carefully as she led the way into the patch of evergreens, and Teeny and I followed a few feet back.

  At last, we made our way out of the tall Christmas trees, and reached the area where KP plants all the baby trees that he planned to harvest in five or ten years. The baby trees were only one or two feet tall, so we suddenly had a clear view of the farm.