by R M Wild
Red Rum
A Rosie Casket Mystery
R.M. Wild
Version 1.0 (3/20)
Copyright © 2021 by R.M. Wild
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Description
How do you like your firewater?
Straight?
Or do you prefer a good chase?
After finally receiving some publicity in a national magazine, Rosie Casket has her hands full trying to keep her bed and breakfast afloat.
But when new clues bob to the surface about her sister’s disappearance, she gets sidetracked from taking care of the inn and goes sleuthing for answers.
Unfortunately, those answers go up in smoke.
Literally.
Now, not only is she accused of perpetrating the most impossible murder that Maine has ever seen, but everyone in Dark Haven thinks she is a witch.
Will the prophecy from an ancient riddle prove true? Will she and Matt Mettle move closer to a relationship—or will he become the murderer’s next victim?
And can Rosie keep her head above water long enough to stay out of the cauldron?
Or will she get burned at the stake?
Red Rum is the third book in the Rosie Casket mystery series. A little darker than the first two, it moves faster than a brushfire.
Go on, take a thrill pill…click now and discover the secret ingredient in Red Rum!
Contents
Free Boxset
Prologue
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
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
47. Epilogue
Dear Readers
Also by R.M. Wild
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Prologue
Fifteen Years Ago
Where the hell was that lazy witch?
The street was empty and dark, all the clerks’ and lawyers’ cars fled for the night, the yellow circles from the street lamps overlapping each other like the shiny links in a pair of handcuffs.
At the risk of sounding ungrateful, I admitted that I had an urge to include stupid as a more accurate modifier for “witch,” but seeing how it was already nine o’clock in the evening, and I had been standing outside the courthouse in the cold and waiting for her to come pick me up for more than four hours now, a more appropriate adjective was selfish.
A few hours ago, I had turned down a ride from Mr. Flint, the lawyer who had represented Stanley Eldritch at the hearing to determine whether or not there was enough evidence to drag him to trial for the disappearance of my sister Chrissy, but I was getting desperate enough that I was now regretting my real mother’s advice not to take rides from strangers.
My stomach got all fluttery from the prospect of swearing, but I thought this juncture warranted it.
Where the hell was she?
To be fair, I wasn’t entirely ungrateful toward my foster mother—after all, thanks to drugs and meditation, she did suffer through a relatively smooth and painless adoption when I joined the Slate family. Given that she spent most evenings locked in her room with a bottle of wine, I could only conclude that the shock of seeing my shock of red hair on the front stoop the night when my real mother abandoned me must have been enough to turn her carefully planned world upside down.
Other than those three hours of labor in which her husband made her fill out the paperwork for legal custody, Amy Slate had never worked a day in her life. At least not that I was aware of.
Before agreeing to take me in, she was a proud stay-at-home mother of one teenager. Afterward, she resented the extra cleaning. A glass of wine and a soap opera had turned into extra trips to and from school (Chrissy usually got rides from older boys with driver’s licenses). Thus, as soon as I was old enough to drive myself to school, I was pretty sure Amy Slate was going to throw herself a freedom party.
On top of that, not a day went by that I didn’t resent the nickname she gave me: Rufus. Ugggh. I hated it. I hated the sound of it. I hated the way it made me feel like a boy.
I hated when she said, “Rufus! Get me a wine glass!”
In fact, when I made the transition to junior high last year, the boys overheard Chrissy using the nickname and they became so relentless in their teasing that I had to spend most of my lunch breaks in the bathroom stall.
Where are you hiding, Rufus the doofus?
Hey, Fiddler on the Rufus, don’t cry over red hair!
Throughout my seventh and eighth grade years, my inner dialogue festered and fermented so much that I grew my own baby-bump.
When asked if I was pregnant, I said, “No, just angry.”
One day, I had a feeling my repressed inner dialogue was going to make me explode and bite everyone’s head off.
It came earlier than I thought.
I paced the manicured grass. Behind me, the toilet-bowl-shaped Sunrise County Courthouse was lit bright enough to make its limestone walls look like porcelain. Why did they waste so much taxpayer money keeping the lights on all night? Probably to keep the lawyers from breaking in at midnight and prosecuting each other.
Underfoot, the grass was so perfect, so stiff for this late in the year, that I could feel it poking through my sneaker soles. I could only assume the strips of green were fake, kind of like those squares of mini-golf carpet placed on the floor of the school lavatory. Maybe it was a lawyer thing since my foster father’s grass was just as perfect.
“Where are you, Mother of mine?” I mumbled. “You’re ridiculous.”
Ever since waking up this morning, I knew this was going to happen. Robert had insisted he was too busy to pick me up and delegated the job to his lazy wife. She would be label-deep in bottle of Merlot and forget about me. If only he had let me have a cellphone, I could have called her.
The moment that stupid Mercedes rolled up to the curb, I was going to let her have it:
Gee, MOM, if I should even call you that, were you too busy putting on your fake lashes and powdering the broken blood vessels in your cheeks to remember your familial obligation?
Did you see some rich guy walking down the street and decide to go for cocktails?
What time does the bus come by here? What’s that? Never? Oh, that’s right, I rely on you to keep me safe from kid
nappers and rapists.
Thanks to the grilling I had gotten on the witness stand a few hours ago, I was absolutely seething. Other than Charlie Margin, the creepy hunchback, none of the lawyers in Robert’s firm had come to the testimony to support me. My foster father worked all day so I suppose he was off the hook, but not his wife. She had no excuses. She spent more time drinking mimosas and going online shopping than looking out for me.
I could have used the support when Mr. Flint, the JAG Corps lawyer, totally humiliated me in an attempt to discredit my story. Mr. Eldritch, the lighthouse keeper whom I had accused of killing Chrissy had somehow managed to pack the gallery with fan boys. He had probably broken into their houses and stood over their beds with a harpoon and demanded their fealty.
But me? I had no one sitting in my corner of the gallery to support me, no one but J.R.R. Tolkien.
And he was long dead.
I clenched the ancient copy of The Hobbit that my real mother had bought me. If I had taken Mr. Flint up on his offer to give me a ride, I could have been home by now.
Provided, of course, he didn’t throw me off the cliff for outsmarting him.
Down the street, two pricks of white light grew larger and larger. They were coming toward the courthouse. Finally. Sheesh. I headed for the curb, the lights from the courthouse behind me making my shadow on the concrete look freakish, my shoulders so wide from swimming lessons that I looked like a dwarf with a yoke on her neck.
I wasn’t a naturally vicious person, but I had to let Robert’s wife know how mad I was. I couldn’t just settle into those leather seats and pretend her lack of parental instinct hadn’t punched me in the uterus.
So you finally remembered your poor foster daughter? What happened? Did you realize you might have to take out the trash by yourself tonight?
But instead of a black Mercedes, a turquoise pickup truck drew near. The truck was so clean, it looked as if it had driven off the set of Singin’ in the Rain. It was mean and manly, but curvy and spotless, as if it had spent more time in the garage than on the unforgiving streets of Maine. Its license plate had the typical picture of a lobster and a harbor, but someone had painted the bug yellow, the letters reading GOLDBUG.
My heart slithered down my leg and plopped into my heel. A great pressure welled up inside my face.
My foster mother had completely abandoned me.
The driver leaned across the passenger seat and rolled down his window. “You’re still here?”
I wiped my eyes. He had hard cheekbones, a bony brow, and his eyes looked like open manholes in the dark. A fat pink scar divided his forehead into distinct halves. He was wearing a white, long-sleeve henley, his sleeves rolled up, his forearms thicker than sewer pipes. He was probably in his early forties and had a heavy, red beard. If the truck hadn’t been so pristine, I would have assumed he was one of the roughnecks who worked on the pier.
Peter Hardgrave. He owned the bar downstairs from the apartment where my real mom and I used to live.
“Tough break, Rosie. I was at the hearing earlier. I listened to your testimony.”
When I was sitting in the witness stand, I had kept my eyes on Mrs. Waldenflower, the prosecutor. She had warned me not to look at the audience, or else I might feel rattled. I tried to remember if I had seen this particular man, but I couldn’t picture him.
“You remember my name?”
“Of course,” Hardgrave said. “You used to live upstairs. I knew your mother well.”
“Were you there to support old-man Eldritch?”
“Not exactly,” he said.
“He kidnapped my sister.”
“Take it easy. I’m familiar with the allegations. I just came to get my fishin license renewed. I walked past the courtroom, saw that something interesting was goin on, and popped in. I thought you handled yourself well. I thought to myself, now there’s a girl who can take care of herself.”
“Thank you,” I said. “But it didn’t feel that way.”
“What book are you holdin there?”
“Tolkien.”
“Ah yes. The Hobbit. I remember.”
“Remember what?”
“Nothing. Listen, I’m headed back to Dark Haven. Do you need a ride?”
I remembered my real mother’s advice: You’re a pretty girl and you should never, ever, take rides from strangers. That same advice had gotten truncated after moving to Dark Haven, and my mother had said, Don’t take rides from any of these perverts.
Hardgrave didn’t look like a pervert, at least not in that shiny truck. He looked more like an ex soldier who had been living in the woods for fifteen years to hide from the government. In all the movies, kidnappers drove sketchy white vans. Hardgrave looked more like Quint in Jaws, if Quint had spent a decade doing pushups in a jungle prison in Vietnam and dyed his beard red.
Besides, if Hardgrave happened to kidnap me, then my foster mother would feel really bad. As if she hadn’t learned a lesson from Chrissy’s disappearance.
Hardgrave popped the door handle and pushed the passenger door open. “Did you hear me, Rosie? I just offered you a ride.”
“I’m waiting for my mother,” I said.
“She ain’t coming,” he said.
“I meant my foster mother.”
“She ain’t coming neither.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What makes you say that?”
“Cuz the hearin ended like four hours ago. If your mother was coming to get you, she would have come by now. I certainly woulda.”
“She’s late, that’s all.”
“C’mon Rosie, get in. It’s cold and it’s too far to walk. I ain’t no kidnapper, and I ain’t no killer neither.”
I stared at the open door.
“If I wanted to kidnap you, I could have done it years ago when you lived upstairs.”
True, I thought. And then, against everything in the universe telling me not to, I climbed in.
I clutched my book, my knuckles white, and watched the road signs intently, hoping we were headed back to Coral Bay and not to some remote cabin in the woods with chainsaws used as wall decorations.
How stupid was I?
The whole ride, the Apache took the potholes like a champ. Even though I was sitting on the edge of the seat, the white vinyl seam cutting into the underside of my thighs, my feet couldn’t touch the floor. Under my sneakers, an empty liquor bottle with a penny inside kept rolling around and rattling like a half-empty bottle of aspirin.
If I made it out of this alive, I would never hitchhike again. I swore it on my own grave.
“Relax, we’re almost there,” Hardgrave said. He kept his right hand on the wheel, his left elbow on the door. “You got a raw deal today. I don’t like the way that lawyer treated you, to be honest. I used to be in the military myself and lemme tell you, them JAG boys ain’t the real Navy. You ain’t the real Navy until you done yer drown-proofing. That’s what we call it when you gotta tread water and make a life vest out of your own pants. Sure, that Flint fellow’s got enough hot air to blow up his trousers, but when the sharks come nibbling, he would start sinking.”
I nodded, pretending to listen. Up ahead, was the sign for Dark Haven, the parade of red lobsters following each other around the trim, their antennae to telson like elephants in a circus grabbing each other’s tails.
“What was your sister’s name again?”
“Chrissy,” I said.
“And you said she ran into the woods and disappeared?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t see nothing?”
“Only that skeevy lighthouse keeper.”
“No cars or nothing?”
“A flash of light, that’s all. Like I said on the stand. Why do you care?”
“I’m just wondering. It’s awful strange.”
“What’s awful strange?”
“That you didn’t see nothing else.”
We drove past the shops on Main Street, past the harbor. At the intersection with
Maple Street, he made a left. Then at the top of the hill, he made another left onto Pine Street.
“How’d you know where I live?”
He cleared his throat, coughed, and jiggled his Adam’s apple with two fingers. “You said in your testimony that Robert Slate is your foster father. All the fat cats live on Pine Street,” he said. He pointed to the big yellow Federal. “Lemme guess, that one’s yours, the one painted gold?”
“Yes,” I said and reached for the door handle.
“Hold up now, Rosie. Lemme stop the truck first. You’ll get your legs run over.”
He pulled the truck up to the curb. The truck had barely stopped moving when I threw open the passenger door and jumped out.
I ran straight for the front door.
“Hold up!” Hardgrave shouted. “Ain’t you gonna thank me?”
“Thank you!” I said.
“What about a hug? Is that too much to ask for?”
I kept running.
“Fine, no hug,” he muttered.
The upstairs windows were yellow with light and the Mercedes was still lounging in the driveway, the garage lights reflecting sharply along its lazy curves.
My fear of being kidnapped had used up so much energy that I had forgotten my animosity toward Amy. But as soon as I was safely on the front porch, the anger came roaring back.
