Fireside Homicide Cozy Mystery Bundle

by Willow Monroe

  Jenny nodded. “Why don’t you just quit?”

  Josie rolled her eyes. “I have to pay off my student loans. Daddy’s orders.”

  Jenny chuckled. “Always bills to pay.”

  Josie didn’t smile. She was still watching her boss argue. Wilma and Margaret’s conversation had devolved into a hissing match. It wasn’t pretty.

  “Before he died, Margaret’s husband was a friend of my dad’s,” Josie said. “The two of them would get together and talk about how real work is good for the soul.”

  “What does that mean?” Jenny asked, taking Josie’s empty cup and throwing it away for her.

  “Apparently it means I’m not allowed to use my engineering degree until Margaret ‘releases me from service’.” She put a one-handed air quote around that last part, since her other hand was full. Then she rolled her eyes and looked at the van Winklets again. “That woman is going to live forever.”

  “Josie!” Margaret, face red, turned away from Wilma and snapped her fingers in the young nurse’s direction. “I need my oxygen. This...child...” she waved a hand at Wilma, “Is upsetting me.”

  “Duty calls,” Josie muttered. She rearranged all the straps on her shoulders and maneuvered the bags until she could reach one of the bigger ones. She partially unzipped it, then fiddled with something inside. Finally, she pulled out a tube and walked away, toward Margaret.

  No wonder those were so heavy, Jenny thought. The poor girl was carrying around oxygen tanks.

  Margaret put the fox down, and he swished his bushy tail like she’d crimped it. Jenny watched him to make sure he didn’t go for Chuck again.

  He didn’t, but only because he got intercepted by, surprisingly enough, Wilma. As Jenny watched, Wilma knelt down beside him and poured a puddle of eggnog into her outstretched hand. He hesitated, then lapped it up, so she gave him more. A lot more, actually. He finished off the cup and let her wipe his little black nose off.

  Jenny hoped the eggs didn’t make him sick. He was a pretty creature, with that red fur and those tall ears. If Margaret was taking him to the petting zoo, the kids would fall in love with him.

  Speaking of the petting zoo, Jenny remembered that she hadn’t made it over there yet, so she told Sissy where she was going, just in case, and headed that way.

  She smelled it long before she got there.

  The ‘zoo’ was really just a large semicircle of pens set up in an area not far from the parking lot, near the fairground lodge. Around the pens was a tall fence, just in case something tried to escape. Inside, there were the usual suspects - goats, a couple of piglets, a calf with soft brown eyes.

  Every year it was pandemonium, because parents saw a chance for a moment’s peace - the outer fence looked a lot like a giant playpen - and turned their kids loose inside to roam around as they pleased. It made for more chaos than most people could handle.

  This year, they were supposed to have a treat. The rumor was that a man was bringing a pair of real reindeer down from Wyoming, and Jenny had already confirmed via Mayor Coleman that a scientist was coming from the Knoxville Zoo with a polar bear cub. She was excited.

  “Ah, the bracing scent of manure in the dark,” a voice beside her said.

  Jenny turned and smiled when she saw Harvey Gibbs, the theater owner. His two Siberian Huskies twined around his legs on their leashes. “Hi, Harvey,” she said, reaching down to scratch one of the dogs behind its ears. Her hand sank two inches into the fur before she touched skin. “Is this Groucho or Chico?” she asked. “I can never tell which one is which.”

  “That’s Chico,” Harvey said, wrapping both leads tightly around his arm so that he could shake Jenny’s hand. He looked more like a lumberjack than a member of the Rotary Club, with that toboggan on his head and his beard beginning to grow out for winter. “He has black on the tips of his ears, and he’s a big old flirt. Groucho is shy.”

  “I’ll never remember that. Are the kids having fun over there?” Jenny nodded toward the petting zoo.

  “Oh, yeah. It’s much better than last year. Old Cranky Coleman finally got around to hiring some crowd control.”

  Well, that was good news. Jenny smiled.

  “Where’s old Chuck tonight?” Harvey asked. “I know Sissy didn’t leave him at home.”

  “He’s over in the eggnog booth, where it’s quieter. He’s kind of shy, too.”

  In truth, Chuck would have loved the attention, but the last time they tried it, it had been a disaster. As things turned out, he got aggressive when a bunch of kids poked him for two hours. He tended to poke back - with his beak. When they finally got him home, he ran under the nearest hen house and didn’t come out for two days. Jenny understood completely, and Sissy had agreed that they should never put him through that again.

  “Well, back to work!” Harvey nodded goodbye and loped on ahead with his dogs. Groucho and Chico were always favorites, and the kids liked to ask Harvey questions while the pups gave them a tongue bath. Thankfully, Harvey liked answering them. He genuinely liked kids, and Jenny didn’t think she’d ever seen a man so devoted to his dogs. He told her once that he had slept in the run with his female on the night that Groucho, Chico, Zeppo, and Bondo were born.

  Yes, he knew that Bondo wasn’t one of the Marx Brothers. He just thought it was funny.

  Jenny stepped in through the chain link gate and looked around. The smell was definitely worse in here, but it wasn’t horrible. It was just very, very...earthy.

  Harvey had the huskies off to her left, throwing toys to them. Beside him, in the next enclosure, was Mrs. Douglas. She sold fresh goat’s milk at the farmer’s market, and tonight she had two Nubian pygmy goats in her little pen. Jenny watched her bend over at the waist and snap her fingers. When she did, the little guys would jump up on her back, ears flying, and the children who saw it all squealed with delight.

  To Jenny’s right, there was a big crowd, and she suspected that was the polar bear pen.

  Next in the circle was Mrs. Evans with a calf, and after that Jenny couldn’t see because a small, quiet crowd had gathered. She could hear, though.

  “I will not put him in a cage!” Margaret van Winklet snapped. She must have arrived at the petting zoo while Jenny was talking to Harvey. Who was she yelling at now? Jenny made her way a little closer to see.

  Mayor Coleman, who looked a lot like one of those Russian nesting dolls, was standing on the inside of a smallish enclosure. Margaret was on the outside, glaring and poking a bony finger at him. Napoleon was snuggled into the crook of her arm.

  “We can’t have wild animals running all over creation,” Coleman protested, waving his arms. When he got mad, his belly stuck out a little farther than usual, and tonight it looked like it might bust right through his shirt and snap his red suspenders.

  It looked to Jenny like they weren’t even listening to each other. They were both angry. Did Margaret cause friction everywhere she went? That must be exhausting.

  “He isn’t wild. He’s better behaved than these sticky little monsters,” Margaret countered.

  That got a murmur from the crowd. Most of them were the parents of the ‘sticky little monsters’.

  “I’m sorry, then,” Coleman was saying. “You’ll need to take him home. Rules are rules.”

  Jenny made her way around and under a few more elbows until she was beside Coleman. He glanced at her, his eyebrows raised.

  “What are you doing here?” Margaret asked, hugging Napoleon closer, as if Jenny was going to steal him.

  Jenny shot him a smile and turned to Margaret. “Ma’am, I think that maybe Mayor Coleman here isn’t explaining things very well.”

  “How so?” There went that haughty eyebrow again.

  “He’s a good little fox, I think, but I’m afraid that if you let him run loose he might wander too far and get hurt,” Jenny said. She was making it up as she went along. “He could get stepped on, or kicked by one of the other animals. Maybe even bitten - did you know pigs bite?�
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  Margaret looked alarmed, but she still wasn’t mollified. “No. Oh, that’s a very good point. If one of these animals hurt him, the owners would be in court so fast they wouldn’t even know how they got there.” Her words were sharp, vicious, and full of promise. She wasn’t kidding.

  Jenny wondered whose idea it was to invite her to participate in the first place. That person needed to be fired. She didn’t know Margaret that well, but the general consensus of people who knew her was holding true: the woman was a witch.

  While Margaret thought about that, Jenny happened to catch sight of Josie, standing close to the outer fence. She had put the heavy bags down at her feet and she was holding one hand with the other, massaging it. Her eyes were steadily burning holes in Margaret’s back.

  “Fine,” Margaret said finally. “I’ll keep him here, but I won’t let him down on that filthy ground. He’ll get wet, and he hates to get wet.”

  From his cradle in her elbow, Napoleon the fox looked plenty comfortable, right where he was. He might have even been sleepy. His little eyes were all droopy and Jenny thought she saw a tiny sparkle of drool on his little lip. In fact, once Jenny looked closer, she thought that he seemed just a little bit...drunk?

  “Oh, no,” she said under her breath.

  Chapter Five

  She stepped away from Margaret and Coleman and pulled her cell phone from her pocket. Nat Petersen, the local vet, answered on the second ring.

  “Nat, I think we have a problem.”

  “Well, hello to you, as well, Jenny. What’s up?” She could hear the grin in the Swedish man’s deep voice.

  “Sorry.” She explained what had happened - or at least what she thought had happened. She didn’t know anything for sure. “But we need to make this look like a casual thing, if we can. Margaret’s been yelling at Wilma already tonight, and I don’t want to make it worse.”

  “Of course, of course. I understand. Margaret can be a handful when it comes to her beautiful Napoleon.”

  “How soon can you be here?” she asked, hoping that the fox didn’t get worse.

  Nat laughed. “Look behind you.”

  Jenny turned around to see him coming her way, carrying the briefcase that held his normal supplies. Relieved, she walked over and gave him a hug. “Thank you so, so much,” she said. “I’m worried about him.”

  “He’ll be fine. It doesn’t sound like he drank so much, so he’ll probably just sleep it off. You know? Like us?”

  Jenny laughed as he walked away, toward the animal enclosure.

  Immediate problem solved, Jenny turned away and went over to speak to Josie. “Hey, did you hurt your hand?” she asked.

  Josie made a face. “No worse than normal. Those bags are heavy.”

  Jenny nodded and looked at it. There were deep red marks all across the girl’s lily white palm, and they looked painful.

  Now that they were face to face, Jenny noticed that Josie’s eyes were red, too, and she kept sniffling. Her gaze never strayed far from Margaret, either, and there was plenty of anger there. Jenny started to ask her about it, but then hesitated, not sure if she should. After all, Josie didn’t know her. She might not want to share.

  Josie caught Jenny’s expression. “You’re still wondering why I don’t just quit, aren’t you?”

  “No, you told me enough to understand that. Family stuff is complicated, and I’m sure you don’t want to disappoint your father.”

  Josie shook her head. “It’s not that - I’ve disappointed Daddy lots of times. The thing is, he threatened to cut me out of his will if I didn’t do this for him. It’s like a...what did he call it? A life lesson, or something.”

  Jenny nodded. The picture was getting clearer. If she had to guess, Jenny thought that Josie might just be a little bit of a brat, too. It sounded like this might be the first time the girl ever had to earn anything on her own. If that was true, then Daddy, whoever he was, was trying to teach her a lesson.

  That would also explain why she didn’t get along with Margaret. They were too much alike - spoiled rotten.

  Their conversation was interrupted when Margaret’s voice cut through the air. “Josie! Please fill Napoleon’s water dish. Hurry - he’s been poisoned!”

  Most of the crowd had dispersed after the argument, but a few people were still hanging around. Those people sucked in a collective gasp at the word poison.

  Jenny groaned.

  Josie stared at Margaret. “Did she just say that Napoleon was poisoned?”

  “Yes, but she’s being a little bit dramatic.”

  Josie frowned. “How do you know that?”

  “Never mind. I gotta go,” Jenny said, and made her escape. She didn’t want to be there when Margaret blew.

  She was halfway across the enclosure when somebody called out, “Hey! Hello again!”

  She turned to see who it was and smiled. The man from earlier, the good-looking one with the nice beard, was waving at her. He was standing in front of an enclosure, and when she looked closer she saw that there were reindeer in there. With a grin, she headed that way.

  So this was the man from Wyoming, she thought as she reached his side. They sure grew ‘em pretty up there. She could look at him all day long.

  He held out a hand for her to shake. “Welcome! Come see my reindeer!”

  Jenny laughed at his enthusiasm. He had set up two small spotlights to shed more light in the enclosure, and the resulting shadows made the big deer look even bigger. “They’re beautiful,” she said. One of the deer noticed her and came over to nudge her outstretched hand. “Hi, there, boy,” she said softly, so as not to startle him.

  “Girl,” the man said. Then he held out a hand for her to shake. “I’m Rutherford Pike,” he said. “Ruddy to my friends.”

  “I’m Jenny - It’s nice to meet you.” She glanced at the reindeer, who was nosing along the fence now. “Did you say this was a female?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Jenny cocked her head. “Females have antlers?”

  “Yep. Both male and females grow ‘em. The males shed them in December, but the females keep theirs until late spring.”

  “Why?” she asked. She’d never heard of such a thing.

  “No idea,” he said, laughing.

  She looked at the deer again, and thought how pretty they were. OK, not pretty, exactly, but at least...interesting. They had wise eyes. One of them pawed at the ground and she wondered what it was sniffing.

  “What do they eat?” she asked.

  “Alfalfa. Acacia branches for a treat. They like to nose around the ranch for ferns and they’ll eat most any tree leaves they can reach.”

  The deer grunted back and forth a couple of times, and she wondered if they were talking, but it seemed silly to ask. Besides, Rutherford had started telling her a story about a time when they’d stampeded through his garden and killed fifty acres of corn before he rounded them all up.

  The story was funny, and now that she noticed, he smelled good. Some very male scent that was a lot nicer than eau-de-petting zoo.

  Then she wondered if the good-looking Rutherford Pike was flirting with her. That thought made her forget all about the drama of the evening and relax a little. She was enjoying herself - standing here with a nice man, looking at the animals like she didn’t have a care in the world.

  It was too bad that Josie chose that moment to scream.

  Chapter Six

  Jenny gasped and turned to see her running toward the parking lot. Trying not to fall on the cold, slick grass, Jenny took off after her.

  “I hate you, you old hag!” Josie screamed, her voice ringing clearly over the somber strains of Silent Night. “I quit!”

  Jenny stumbled at the words - hadn’t Josie just said that she couldn’t quit? She got her footing again, but by then she’d lost sight of Josie. She tried to hurry, making her way through the crowd of excited kids and concerned parents, and kept going until she reached the main gate. Leaning against the wrough
t iron pole, she tried to catch her breath while she looked around.

  The lot, as well as the overflow lot behind it, was completely full of cars. There wasn’t much movement, though. Everyone was inside the park. She spotted one teenaged boy near a pickup truck, but he didn’t look like he had noticed anything. Otherwise, the lot was dead quiet.

  Josie hadn’t been that far ahead - where could she have gone?

  Jenny’s eyes landed on a big, shiny Ford truck, parked over to one side. Aha - that had to be it. Not the truck itself, but the huge silver and white horse trailer behind it. It was at least five parking spaces long. The back door was down, forming a ramp with skinny holes in it. Those holes would act as vents when the door was closed, she knew.

  She was willing to bet the trailer belonged to Ruddy. His animals were the only ones here big enough to require equipment like that.

  That had to be where she was hiding.

  Jenny pushed off the post, only to squeak and spin around when a hand dropped down and squeezed her shoulder. She turned to see Margaret, who was breathing heavily and looked like she might pass out any minute.

  “I’ll...go,” the old woman gasped. “Make yourself useful - go back and get my oxygen tank.”

  Jenny hesitated. “Maybe we should call someone, or just let her cool off for a few minutes. She was awfully mad...”

  Margaret was already shaking her head. Her steely gaze met Jenny’s and left no room for argument. “She’s done this before. It’s fine.”

  Jenny nodded and pointed toward the trailer. “All right. I think she went in there.”

  Ruddy met her just inside the gate. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  Jenny frowned. “I’m not sure, exactly. Be right back.”

  He nodded, and when she took off again he followed her.

  The pile of baggage was where they’d left it, in the enclosure for the fox. Jenny wasn’t about to carry all of it, so she flipped open the bags until she found the one with the green and silver canister with yellow hazard triangles all over it. It was the travel-sized kind, about a foot long and four or five inches in diameter. Underneath it, in the bag, was a bunch of stuff - pill bottles, a syringe case, a first aid kit.