The Eleventh Hour

by Anina Collins

  THE ELEVENTH HOUR

  ANINA COLLINS

  The Eleventh Hour

  Poppy McGuire has always been a curious soul, but it’s her life that’s usually the topic of conversation in the small town of Sunset Ridge. But now one of the town’s most important citizens has been found murdered, and everyone’s life is suspect.

  What begins as a friendly wager with her old friend Officer Derek Hampton soon becomes far more for Poppy, and she turns to Alex Montero for help, but the enigmatic former Baltimore cop’s quiet way hides as many secrets as each suspect they encounter.

  Everyone in Sunset Ridge has something to hide, but Poppy and Alex are determined to uncover the identity of the murderer. They just have to watch that they don’t become the next victims.

  The Eleventh Hour is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to events, locations, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  2016 Eight Feathers Press, LLC

  Copyright © 2016 Eight Feathers Press, LLC

  Kobo Edition

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  Published in the United States

  ISBN: 978-0-9972153-1-1

  Book Cover Design by Susan Coils

  aninacollins.com/subscribe

  Click on the covers below to learn more about the series:

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  About the Book

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  About The Author

  Chapter One

  The town of Sunset Ridge hadn’t had a murder in almost a decade. Well, that wasn’t exactly the truth, but the town’s leaders had done everything in their power to make it seem like it was. In the world of small towns, perception is everything.

  The awful whining sound of a Sunset Ridge police car’s siren jarred me out of a daydream about that trip to Ireland I kept promising myself I’d take, and I sat bolt upright in my kitchen chair as the thought that something terrible had happened to my father tore through my brain. Still groggy since I hadn’t had my first cup of morning coffee yet, I reached for my cell phone and called him. As usual, he answered in that casual way of his.

  “It’s a little early to be calling, isn’t it, honey?”

  “I heard a siren and just wanted to check that everything’s okay,” I said as relief washed over me.

  “I’m okay, honey. It’s probably just Derek overreacting to some traffic issue.”

  Looking out my kitchen window, I saw the first rays of the sun just beginning to peek up over the horizon. “It’s a little early for Derek to be using the siren for something as small as a traffic stop, Dad. I wonder what happened.”

  My father chuckled low and deep in a way that reminded me of when he used to play Santa at Christmastime when I was a little girl. “Well, now that you know I’m okay, you can go find out what’s going on. Just remember our chief isn’t a fan of you poking your nose around in the police department’s cases, Poppy. The last time he caught you I heard about it at the bar for weeks.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Dad. I’m a grown woman, and Dominick doesn’t scare me. He hasn’t since the sixth grade when he pulled my hair on the way home from school and I punched him straight in the nose.”

  Another chuckle and then my father gave me his usual warning when he knew I was about to go investigating. “Just be careful, Elizabeth. Even in Sunset Ridge, there are bad people.”

  I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at his words. Whenever he called me by my given name instead of the nickname everyone usually used, I knew he was serious. To him, I was perpetually that sixth grade girl who had to be talked into defending herself against Dominick Hampton.

  But I wasn’t that girl anymore. After thirty-one years, I’d met my fair share of good and bad people. In fact, if my father knew even a fraction of what I’d seen, he likely would have done everything in his power to force me to move in with him in that place of his above the bar he ran a few blocks away.

  “Yes, Dad. Don’t worry. I’ll make sure to keep my eyes open and my nose clean.”

  “Good. Will I see you later tonight? You haven’t been by the bar in a few weeks.”

  Standing from the table, I peered out my window that overlooked my backyard and gave me a good look at the houses on the next street. Seeing nothing but the usual early morning comings and goings, I headed toward the dish drainer next to the sink to grab my coffee mug and begin my day.

  “Maybe. Who knows? I might find something interesting was going on with that siren. I’ll talk to you later, Dad. I’m happy to hear you’re okay.”

  “Always, honey. You don’t have to worry about me going anywhere anytime soon. You’re stuck with me for a long time.”

  The thought of my father not being around settled into my brain and a lump formed in my throat. Pushing it down, I forced myself to stay cheery. “I love you, Dad. Talk to you later.”

  “I love you, Poppy. Be careful.”

  I pressed END and set my cell phone down on the kitchen countertop to get my morning coffee going. While I absentmindedly went through the steps needed for coffee to appear in my mug, I tried to push the upsetting idea of my father dying out of my head. I knew it was irrational, but since my mother’s death, I worried about him.

  Not that he was on death’s doorstep. Nowhere close. For a man in his fifties, he acted more like a twenty-something. Some days he could be found hiking in the mountains just outside of town, and then other times he’d join the neighborhood kids in a pickup basketball game at the park near the bar.

  Joe McGuire definitely had a lot of years left. It was just the loss of my mother that made me forget that sometimes. Worrying about him had become my avocation over the years to the point of giving up the chance for a future with a few boyfriends I cared about in favor of staying in Sunset Ridge near my father.

  I didn’t regret my choices so much as wonder if I’d really made them for the reasons I believed. Such were the thoughts that settled into my brain as I leaned against the gold Formica countertop in my kitchen sipping my morning dose of the nectar of the gods. They may have craved ambrosia, but for me, coffee was that perfect drink that gave me what I needed to start my day.

  My first cup finished, I headed off toward the shower to get ready to check out the reason for Derek’s siren before I started work for the day.

  The Grounds, the coffee shop nearest to The Sunset Eagle newspaper offices, bustled with customers flowing in to get their morning drink. A local version of the far more popular coffee shops the town council had decided couldn’t do business within city limits, The Grounds served the most delicious pastries I’d ever tasted, in addition to coffee and tea. I blamed the owners, Pam and Gerald Branch, for the ten pounds I’d gained in the past year because of their heavenly danish that
literally melted on the tongue. I needed more will power and less danish, if the feel of my skirt around my waist was any indication.

  Standing fourth in line, I checked my phone for any messages and heard the morning’s gossip. Unlike the usual whispers about what had happened at the town council meeting or who had been seen the night before at Diamanti’s, the best restaurant in town, today’s gossip was all about something that hadn’t occurred in Sunset Ridge in nearly a decade.

  Murder.

  But whose? I leaned closer to the man in front of me, close enough to smell the remnants of his menthol shaving cream he’d used as he got ready that morning, and heard the words “strangled right in her own home.”

  I tapped him on the shoulder, surprising him out of his whispering to the woman next to him, and he turned around with wide eyes to look at me. Before he could say anything, I asked, “Who was strangled?”

  “You’re Poppy McGuire, aren’t you?” he asked as he searched my face. “I remember you from school.”

  Not really interested in taking a stroll down memory lane with whoever he was, I smiled and nodded. “Was someone in town strangled?”

  “Yes,” he answered as the line inched forward toward the counter. “Geneva Woodward was found strangled in her home not an hour ago. We assumed it was just Derek indiscriminately using that damn siren again, but this time he wasn’t crying wolf. A murder in Sunset Ridge. It’s been so long, I’m not even sure the cops will know what to do.”

  A murder in Sunset Ridge! The hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention as a chill raced down my spine. The sleepy little hamlet of Sunset Ridge had very little crime, much less murder. It was the type of place where people still left their doors unlocked when they went to bed at night. My hometown always seemed like someplace straight out of Norman Rockwell’s paintings—the kind of Americana that people on the coasts insisted didn’t exist anymore, if it ever had.

  Lost in the news that a murder had been committed right there in what was thought to be our tight-knit community, I didn’t see it was my turn to order until the woman behind me gently nudged my shoulder.

  “You’re up, sweetie.”

  I gave the elderly woman with the steel grey hair a meek smile and stepped up to the counter to speak to Jennie, the morning cashier at The Grounds. A student at one of the local community colleges, she had been the person who served me my second cup of morning coffee every Monday through Friday for the past four years. We’d talked a few times about my job as an investigative journalist for The Bottom Line, so I wasn’t surprised when she leaned toward me and in a tone full of curiosity asked, “Are you on your way to the murder scene? It’s all anyone can talk about since we first heard about it.”

  Smiling, I nodded, happy to give her the idea that I was better connected than I actually was. In truth, while Derek might not have a problem letting me poke my nose into his newest and biggest case ever, his brother and the police chief Dominick would likely clap the cuffs on me if he caught me within twenty yards of the crime scene.

  But I’d try anyway.

  I handed Jennie five dollars and told her to keep the change before grabbing my danish and coffee and turning on my heels to head the three blocks north toward Geneva Woodward’s home in the ritzy section of town where the houses were finer and more distinguished than the rest of Sunset Ridge.

  And the residents who lived in them were like local royalty.

  The crowd of people standing on the sidewalk in front of Geneva’s sprawling blue and white Queen Anne Victorian home grew by the minute with neighbors rubbernecking to get a look at the scene of death inside. I pushed my way through mothers stopped on their way to school with their children, old ladies with little dogs in their arms, and a few elderly men who’d paused in their morning walk to give their opinion on how wealthy people lived differently than the rest of us.

  I approached Craig, the man who occupied the lowest rung on the Sunset Ridge police force ladder. Three years younger than me, he’d always harbored a not-so-secret crush for me since high school. He stood under six foot and was thin, which gave him a slight appearance, but big blue eyes never failed to charm the onlookers he usually was charged to control.

  “Hi Poppy,” he said with a big, boyish smile. “I guess you heard about all the excitement. Everyone’s pretty much gone now, but Derek’s still inside with the coroner.”

  Looking past him, I scanned the house’s wrap-around porch for anyone else that might be there. “Dominick around?”

  Craig’s smile grew bigger, and he shook his head. “Nope. You’re in the clear.”

  I patted him on the shoulder as I walked by. “Thanks, Craig. Watch these people. This is the biggest news since that town council meeting when Derek had to arrest that streaker last year.”

  He threw his head back and laughed, likely remembering how the policeman looked chasing after a naked and wrinkly old man running through council chambers yelling about how the hike in taxes would steal the clothes off his back.

  “I’m on the job. Good to see you again, Poppy.”

  I waved back at him and smiled, flattered as always by his crush on me. Climbing the five wooden steps up to Geneva’s porch, I wondered what a strangulation looked like. I’d never seen a murder victim in person, so I stopped a moment at the front door to take a deep breath and prepare for what might await me inside.

  Derek spied me there and walked over shaking his head. “I should have known you’d show up. Are you here as an investigative journalist for The Bottom Line or as the writer of the society page for The Sunset Ridge Eagle?”

  Tilting my chin up, I leveled my gaze on Derek Hampton’s attractive face. A friend of my family’s since I was a little girl, he had grown into the kind of man who just had to be in law enforcement. Tall, muscular, and strong, he still looked like the star football player he’d been back in high school over a decade ago. But he’d always been more jock than brain, so despite having dreamy brown eyes the color of dark chocolate and beautiful, oh-so-touchable wavy brown hair, he and I had always been nothing more than friends.

  “I admit my work for The Bottom Line is pretty much just collecting gossip, Derek, but give me some credit for being a decent human being. Anyway, Geneva Woodward isn’t anyone the site’s fans would care about. They prefer a different crowd. And it’s a little ghoulish for me to be here as the society page writer, don’t you think?”

  He thought about what I’d said for a long moment, shrugged, and flashed me one of his trademark flirty grins. “Then you’re here because you can’t keep yourself away from me? Any chance you brought me my favorite danish?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Really? You’ve got a dead woman inside and you’re going for hitting on me?”

  Derek stepped aside to show me Geneva Woodward lying on her hardwood floor not ten feet away. “She doesn’t care.”

  Walking past him toward where Geneva lay, I chastised him for being a smart ass. “A little decorum, Derek. A woman’s been murdered.”

  He followed behind me as I made my way into the elegantly decorated formal dining room. Although a body lay on the floor, my eyes couldn’t help scanning everything else around me. A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling above, surrounded by a decorative plaster medallion with an Old World scroll pattern. The walls were covered in a gold and cream colored velvet flocked wallpaper so indicative of the Victorian Era and the kind that always seemed to have a hidden terrifying face in the pattern. On the hardwood floor underneath a heavy cherry wood dining set lay a decorative rug of burgundy and cream.

  And Geneva dead, her long blond hair spread out around her head like a halo and a pained, shocked expression permanently etched into her fine features.

  “Someone strangled her with one of her own scarves,” Derek explained as he tried to direct my attention away from the décor.

  I looked down at her there near my feet and recognized the bright red scarf around her neck. “I saw her wearing that one night at Diamanti’s.
It’s expensive.”

  Derek swiveled his head back and forth to look at the room that surrounded us. “Would you expect anything less from the look of this place?”

  Geneva Woodward had inherited her family’s money that went back all the way to before the Civil War. It had long been rumored the Woodward fortune came from bootlegging whisky in the nearby mountains, despite the airs the family had always put on around town. When Geneva’s parents died months apart nearly twenty years ago, she’d come into millions, along with the upscale Victorian home I stood in and various vacation homes around the world she never used.

  Shaking my head to answer his question, I secretly admitted to myself that I’d been jealous of Geneva more than once. Wealthy, beautiful, and able to live a life of indolent luxury, she seemed to have everything without having to work a day for it.

  “You ever been in here before today?” Derek asked. “I always figured it would look more like a museum.”

  Sidestepping his question, I asked a few of my own in Gatling gun fashion. “How long is she dead? Did the killer take anything? Was this a robbery too? Did they break in?”

  He stepped back, almost as if he felt under attack by my rapid fire questioning, and then he answered each one in succession. “The coroner guesses she died late last night. We don’t know if anything is missing yet. It could take weeks to inventory everything in this house. She had what looks like a million things in here, and they all appear priceless. But right now, we’re considering this a murder only. And no, there was no forcible entry.”

  I looked around the room and into the next room, a conservatory of some sort, as his answers settled into my brain. “Who would do this to her?” I mumbled, not really looking for him to answer me.

  “Someone who wanted her dead. Now if we’re done here, I need to let the coroner take her body for an autopsy to make sure it was strangulation.”