Peachy Scream

by Anna Gerard

  Peachy Scream

  A GEORGIA B&B MYSTERY

  Anna Gerard

  To my fellow Booklover’s Bench authors: Nancy J. Cohen, Debra H. Goldstein, Cheryl Hollon, Maggie Toussaint, and Lois Winston. Thanks for being my writing posse!

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks as always to everyone at Crooked Lane Books, as well as my team at Hannigan Getzler Literary … all of whom work hard to keep me on track. And a special thank you to author Maggie Toussaint for her assistance with life in small-town Georgia. Her color commentary was invaluable in bringing my fictional town of Cymbeline to life.

  Chapter One

  Finding a dead body in your formal garden has got to rate in the top ten Bad Things that can happen to a person. To be fair, war and plague and famine do have a lock on the first three spots. Poverty and chronic illness are pretty high up there, too. And, of course, it does pretty well suck being the person who croaked. But the whole finding-a-dead-man-in-the-backyard thing deserves at least slot number eight or nine on the countdown.

  Especially when it turns out that the corpse in question actually was murdered.

  My name is Nina Fleet. I pronounce it NINE-ah, like the number nine. At age forty-one, I’m owner, proprietress, and basic Jacqueline-of-all-trades at Fleet House, my fledgling bed and breakfast retreat here in Cymbeline, about an hour west of Savannah, Georgia. The town has a well-deserved reputation as a little gem of an antiquing and arts destination. That means we get lots of tourists and creative types rolling through, a few of whom stay in my humble abode.

  Okay, not so humble. The place is a three-story Queen Anne home dating from the 1890s, built not long after Cymbeline was founded. It sits on a half-acre lot in Cymbeline’s historic district and is separated from the street by a head-high wrought-iron fence. A sprawling magnolia that has to be a good century old holds sway over the far side of the front lawn, looking like something out of Gone With the Wind.

  On the opposite side of the yard is the requisite peach tree, the variety known as Belle of Georgia Peach. My wraparound porch—partially screened in, so that at least one section provides refuge when the mosquitos swarm from dusk to dawn except during the winter—is the ideal place to lounge with a glass of lemonade (or adult beverage, for those of us who indulge). The backyard plays host to formal gardens and sprawling heritage roses, with a covered brick patio that is perfect for outdoor teas and barbeques. And in the very near future I hope to bring in some brides and grooms, since I’m working with a local wedding planner to add garden weddings to my business repertoire

  The house is painted in what I’ve been told is its original palette of green and yellow, with scrumptious gingerbread trim accented in white. And don’t forget the tower room atop the second story that gives a 360-degree view of the surrounding neighborhood. Bottom line, it’s exactly the kind of house that comes to mind when someone talks about classic Queen Anne architecture. It had always been a single-family home until I bought the place earlier in the year and, following a series of interesting events, found myself arm-twisted into converting it into a B&B.

  My partner in the venture is my black, gray, and white Australian shepherd with the trademark odd eyes (one blue, one brown) named Matilda, also known as Mattie. She’s my right-hand (or should I say, right-paw) canine who serves as a combination loyal companion, trusty guard dog, and cute fluffy puppy in my website photos. I rescued her from the Atlanta animal shelter almost two years ago, right after my divorce was finalized, and I couldn’t ask for a better best friend.

  But, back to the dead guy.

  I probably should sound a little more respectful, but I’d only known the victim a couple of days before he met his unfortunate end. And, to be quite honest, in that short time he’d proved himself to be a major horse’s patootie.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m outraged at the thought of a fellow human being murdered, the more so once I eventually found out the “why” of it. But I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that my determination to prove who had actually killed the man may have been less about justice for him and more about making sure that Fleet House didn’t get a rep as a crime-site destination.

  Still, I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night wondering how things would have turned out if I’d simply refused to open my front gate that Saturday morning.

  But I didn’t.

  And it all started with that darned bus.

  * * *

  It was Saturday morning, the first weekend of August. I’d just said goodbye to a group of Atlanta-area writers who’d rented the place for a weeklong summer retreat. They were the kind of guests I liked: neat, friendly, and quiet. Well, except during the final night’s Margarita Happy Hour out on the patio, but even then the raucousness was mostly limited to loud laughter and dirty plays on words.

  The writers had left first thing after breakfast, leaving me a narrow window of time to clean the rooms and get things ready for the next visitors. For the moment, I was my sole housekeeping employee, meaning that all the work was falling to me. Until the prior weekend, I’d had an agreement with Cymbeline High School’s “Young Entrepreneur” summer program. I would get a few hours of free labor from a couple of the participating teens when I needed the help. In return, the kids earned credit hours in the program. Plus, I let them keep any room tips, which usually had them walking out with an extra fifty in their pockets. But with school about to start in a couple of weeks, the program had ended for the summer.

  Normally, I could have found some neighborhood kids to fill the labor gap until the school year started up again. The trouble was that all available hands were on deck in downtown Cymbeline, as the following weekend would kick off the town’s seventh annual Shakespeare on Cymbeline Square (or SOCS, as it appeared in various promotion).

  The three-day event lured aficionados of the Bard from all over Georgia, as well as neighboring states. Of course, the town’s name of Cymbeline (being one of Shakespeare’s plays) was one reason the festival received so much publicity. And then there were various “punny” Shakespeare-related names of local businesses that tourists got a kick out of (Ides of March Dry Cleaning and Brutus Burgers being but a couple of examples).

  According to the FAQs on the festival website, SOCS had started as a hokey Renaissance Faire designed to boost tourism during the slower hot month of August. But as the organizers and attendees grew more sophisticated, the festival slowly morphed into more than carnival rides, giant turkey legs, and wenches in bursting bodices. Now, under the direction of retired college professor Denis Joy, it had become an almost scholarly event, complete with authentic craftspeople and musicians representing the sixteenth century. The highlight of the festival, however, was the nightly performance of one of the Bard’s plays by an amateur Shakespearean troupe.

  And, lucky me, my bed and breakfast was the one the actors had chosen for their stay during this year’s festival!

  To be sure, I’d been a bit confused back in mid-June when a woman had called saying she was the secretary of GASP, and that she was looking to rent out my B&B for a couple of weeks during festival time.

  “Professor Tessa Benedict,” she’d identified herself in self-important tones. And then she’d explained the acronym. Turns out GASP was not some Bondian supervillain organization, but stood for the Georgia Amateur Shakespeare Players. They were based out of Atlanta and were the troupe that would be performing Hamlet at this year’s festival.

  “There are seven of us in the road troupe,” she told me, “plus our director, so that’s eight people total. We have two married couples, and the rest are gentlemen. Unfortunately, our original B&B had to cancel our stay because of some emergency remodeling they have to do, so I do hope you can accommodate us.”

  She had prob
ably already contacted the other dozen or so other competing B&Bs in town, which likely were already booked since the prior year for the festival. But her bad luck was going to be a windfall on my part.

  “As long as the gentlemen don’t mind doubling up, we have room,” I had assured her. “But I’ve only been open a couple of weeks. May I ask how you learned about me?”

  “Our director gave me your contact information. He insisted that we really must stay at your place. Besides which, you do have a Shakespeare garden on the property, do you not?”

  I did. For those not in the know—which had included me, until my evil troll of a gardener, Hendricks, had explained—a Shakespeare garden is a formal series of herb and flower beds containing only plants that are mentioned in the Bard’s works. Mine was situated in the backyard just beyond the brick patio, slightly raised above the level of the sloping yard. It was circular, with a splashy three-tiered concrete fountain in the center, though the outer pathways around it had been squared off on all sides. Thus, a drone’s-eye view of the garden would show a large circle set inside a slightly larger square. Graveled paths divided that circle into four pie pieces of closely planted beds. To the rear of the garden proper, a line of thick, head-high Indian hawthorns that Hendricks had sculpted into a broad green wall separated garden from the rest of the backyard. A narrow opening in that living wall’s center led to a couple of steps that made the slight elevation change to the rest of the yard easier to manage.

  While I knew the Cymbeline Chamber of Commerce had my B&B on their notable gardens list, this would be the first time the Shakespeare garden would have been a specific draw for any guests. Thus, I was more than a bit pleased to assure the professor that I had the garden in question and to take her credit-card information.

  Now, it was well after three PM, my standard check-in time for new guests. I had finished cleaning the rooms almost two hours ago, and I’d already prepped the kitchen and brought in fresh-cut roses to decorate the public areas. My peach tree was just now yielding fruit, and so I’d also harvested a dozen plump, ripe Georgia peaches. They’d go in a big bowl in the dining room for my guests to indulge in.

  With those chores out of the way, I still had plenty of time to change from cut-off jeans and a logoed Fleet House T-shirt into brown capris topped by a crisp white linen top. I bundled my shoulder-length brown hair into a neat innkeeperly bun and then, for good measure, enhanced my equally brown eyes with some cinnamon-colored shadow. And, since my guests still hadn’t arrived yet, I took the opportunity to lounge on the front porch with a book I’d been trying to finish for a good two weeks.

  I heard the bus before I saw it.

  From inside the front door, Mattie gave a howl of welcome (though I realized later it probably was a cry of warning). Setting aside my paperback, I headed down the porch steps.

  By now, exhaust fumes were wafting through my wrought-iron gate, unloading a small country’s-worth of carbon footprint into my front yard. As honeysuckle covered a good portion of the fencing, I couldn’t see much more than the white top of the bus. Still, I could tell it was not one of the ubiquitous sleek gray touring buses that regularly prowled our picturesque brick avenues on the weekends. For one thing, it was about half the size of those behemoths. But it wasn’t until I reached the gate that I got the whole picture.

  As noted, this bus was neither sleek nor gray. Instead, from the roof down, it was blue … genuine 1960s flower-power blue. The bus company’s name, Wild Hare Tours, was prominently splashed across the vehicle’s side in an equally electric shade of yellow. Beneath the name, in much smaller letters, was the company website of the same name. A cartoon of what doubtless was the corporate logo—a frenzied white rabbit dressed in jogging shorts—loped atop the lettering and lent a goofy sort of charm to it. I noted, however, that the bright paint did not quite camouflage the original black lettering that still faintly proclaimed the vehicle as the former property of some local school district.

  A very bad feeling rose inside of me.

  Back in June when I’d first opened for business, I’d spent a mostly contentious few days in the company of an unemployed actor named Harry Westcott, who did a bachelor version of the tiny house thing out of one of those half-sized school buses. Except for our mutual interest in solving the murder of a local real-estate developer, he and I had not gotten along … mostly because Harry claimed that he was the rightful owner of Fleet House. And, like the Terminator, he’d warned me as he left town for an acting job down in Baja California that he’d be ba-a-a-ack.

  But as far as I knew, the guy was still out West filming. Besides, this fume-spewing heap obviously did not transport the awaited Shakespeare troupe. I mean, I couldn’t picture the officious-sounding Professor Benedict riding three hours from Atlanta in such a beater. Though given the hippy-dippy vibe of the bus, I definitely could picture a Jerry Garcia type behind the wheel.

  Pushing away thoughts of past unpleasantness, I opened the gate and stepped out, professional innkeeper smile on my face. I heard the unmistakable pop, hiss, and squeal of bus doors opening. A moment later, the driver was standing on the sidewalk while the doors closed behind him again with an exhausted little gasp.

  I gave a little gasp of my own when I found myself facing, not a Grateful Dead refugee, but a thirty-something Renaissance man.

  For the bus driver was dressed like an extra from that HBO series about young Henry Tudor. His courtier’s short, red-and-black velvet doublet was topped by a starched white ruff the approximate diameter of a turkey platter. He swept off an anachronistic pair of designer sunglasses, revealing bright-blue eyes beneath dark brows, and made an elegant bow in my direction.

  I didn’t bother to curtsy back. Because, alas, I knew him well.

  “You,” I choked out in dismay. “What happened to the cable TV series in Baja?”

  “Internet series,” Harold A. Westcott III, aka Harry, loftily corrected me as he put the sunglasses back on. He named one of the major online networks and continued, “We just wrapped the first eight episodes, and John Cover, Undercover is officially on their mid-fall lineup. But in the meantime, I have obligations here in Cymbeline.”

  The bad feeling returned with a vengeance worthy of Hamlet himself. “Don’t tell me,” I managed, shaking my head in denial. “The Shakespeare festival?”

  The actor gave me a cool smile and nodded.

  “I guess Tessa didn’t mention it, but I spent some time in Atlanta, and I’m currently the director of the Georgia Amateur Shakespeare Players. We’re here, and we have reservations at your fine B&B … oh, and we have a play to put on for the good folks of Cymbeline. Now, perhaps you’ll show us to our rooms.”

  Chapter Two

  While I watched in stunned silence, Harry turned and whipped open the bus door again. The troupe began trooping out, dragging rolling bags and laptop cases, and struggling with a couple of hanging bags each. Chattering loudly, they pretty much ignored me as they marched through the gate I’d just opened and headed up the flagstone walk toward the house’s front door.

  Of course, it made sense now, though I’d not known of Harry’s Atlanta connection until this minute. When Professor Benedict had called to make reservations, she had said that their director had quite specifically told her to contact me. Obviously, Harry had seen another sneaky opportunity to get back inside my house, confident that I’d not dare kick him out as long as the troupe was in residence.

  Which would give him ample time to unleash whatever his latest scheme to steal my house from me was.

  Yep, as I’d mentioned, Harry and I share history. Some of it’s friendly, some of it a bit scary, none of it romantic … but most of it irritating as heck. He’s the grandnephew of my home’s former owner, Mrs. Daisy Lathrop, and he’d been under the impression that he was going to inherit her house when the old woman died. But it turned out that his childless great-aunt never updated her will. And so when the place went up for sale soon after her passing, I’d been in t
he right place at the right time to buy it.

  Call it an impulse purchase. A year after a regrettably public divorce from my golf pro husband—yes, he’s the Cameron Fleet, tour and media darling—I’d had a nice chunk of cash in the bank but still found myself aimlessly drifting through the next chapter of my life. On a long-weekend antiquing jaunt here in Cymbeline, I’d randomly parked in front of the house while checking my GPS for directions and found myself smitten. With nothing to hold me in Atlanta—Cam and I never had any kids, and the rest of my family lives in my home state of Texas—I’d called the number on the “For Sale” sign. By day’s end my cash offer had been accepted.

  I’d only had a couple of weeks to enjoy my new home when Harry got wind of what happened. Soon after, he had begun a campaign of e-mails, voice mails, and mean letters from some random attorney. It had culminated in his actually showing up on my doorstep and then weaseling his way into staying in my newly opened bed and breakfast. We’d called a temporary truce during the whole solving-the-murder thing, mostly because Harry had been a suspect in the formal investigation, and I had reason to believe he was innocent.

  Once the true killer had been caught, Harry had cut short his stay when the TV series opportunity popped up. I’d watched his exhaust-belching bus —same bus as was currently parked at my curb, but not yet wearing its current paint job—rattle down the road on its way to Baja and prayed that I had seen the last of him.

  Apparently, my prayers hadn’t been fervent enough.

  I snapped out of my momentary paralysis and rounded on him. He’d pulled his own set of rolling bags from behind the driver’s seat and was busy closing the bus door behind him.

  “Don’t bother,” I told him, folding my arms over my chest. “You and your troupe are going to be back on board just as soon as I run up to the porch and turn those people around. No way am I letting you stay here again.”