by Ami Diane
Contents
- Book 1: Pancakes and Poison
Copyright
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
- Book 2: The Body in the Boat
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
- Book 3: Christmas Corpse
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
Author's Note
Book 1: Pancakes and Poison
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organization, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2018 Ami Diane
All rights reserved.
Printed and bound in USA. First Printing October 2018
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author, except by reviewers who may quote brief passages
(200 words or fewer) in a review.
Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
Cover design by Ruda Studio. Images courtesy of Adobe Stock photos.
V.12113018.4
Copyright © 2018 Ami Diane
All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 1
FLURRIES OF ANGRY snow beat at the windshield like stars against an inky sky. Ella Barton’s grip on her steering wheel tightened as she leaned forward, squinting through the blizzard-like weather.
The snow blurring past the windshield reminded her of various sci-fi films where the spaceships blasted through space at warp speed. Typically, she would’ve made the accompanying sound effects, but, as it was, most of her brain power was being diverted to keeping the vehicle on the road.
Snow berms spat out by a plow bordered each side of her car like a runway. The back tires on her jeep fish-tailed. Ella sucked in a breath through her teeth. She turned into the slide as she fought to maintain control. The tires found friction again, and the jeep plodded on like a champ.
Slowly, she exhaled and tried her windshield wipers again for the umpteenth time. They were already on their highest setting, and she knew it. But maybe somehow the car had magically changed within the last five minutes.
It hadn’t.
Behind her, Ella’s suitcases rattled in protest at the bumpy road. At least she’d be home in an hour.
Her jeep slid again. She tapped the brakes and slowed further. Maybe an hour and a half.
Thanksgiving with her parents had been more stressful than Portland traffic during rush hour and had resulted in her polishing off the rest of the pumpkin pie. She didn’t regret the pie—which was coming back with a vengeance in the form of heartburn—but she did regret not leaving sooner so she could drive during daylight.
She had checked the road cams before leaving their house, and they had shown only a thin layer of fresh powder on the mountain pass. She made a mental note to be more dubious of technology in the future.
Beyond the swirl of snow, tall ponderosa pines blurred into shadows that whipped by. Her eyes skimmed back to the road.
A sudden flash of bright light lit up the snow-ladened forest. It was as if the sun had popped back up and bathed the world with daylight then disappeared just as quickly.
Ella’s foot mashed the brake pedal, and the car shuddered. After sliding a few yards, the car stopped nearly perpendicular to the road.
She blinked rapidly, trying to clear the after image burned into her eyes. Slowly, the snow falling in her headlights came into focus. Cheese and crackers, what was that?
A bomb? She shook her head. There hadn’t been an explosion. Her next thought was lightning. She vaguely remembered reading an article about thundersnows, rare thunderstorms with snow instead of rain.
That was it. Lightning in a snowstorm.
Her mouth turned down. But without thunder?
Once Ella’s pulse returned to normal, she watched the RPM needle climb as she eased her foot on the gas. The road took a sharp right and descended.
The storm began to let up, and her grip on the wheel loosened enough she felt comfortable adjusting the heater. She was releasing the tension in her shoulders when the car crested a small rise in the landscape.
The jeep’s headlights illuminated packed ice, snowy road, then nothing. The highway stopped abruptly in a dark shadow of… grass?
Ella’s foot let off the gas and all thoughts of lightning left as she leaned forward, eyes squinting. Her brain couldn’t make sense of what her eyes were seeing. The road was gone.
“What the…” The words died on her lips.
She slammed on the brakes then felt the steering wheel go limp. The scenery raced sideways as the car spun on a patch of ice. A scream climbed her throat but never made it out.
Pumping the brakes, she turned her wheel hard into the slide causing it to spin as it completed a three-hundred and sixty-degree spin. The jeep careened to the edge of the road like it had a mind of its own. She had a vague recollection of Herbie the Love Bug as her vehicle used the berm as a ramp.
There was a horrifying moment where the car bested gravity, then an even more horrifying moment as gravity ultimately won and the car dropped into the snow drift on the other side.
Ella flew forward and jerked to a sudden stop against her seatbelt. Her breath came out in ragged gasps, more from shock than anything else.
She leaned back and took stock of her injuries. Ot
her than the stinging in her shoulder where the seatbelt had restrained her and a pulse beating like a jackhammer, she was fine. The airbag hadn’t even deployed, which she now wondered if that was a bad thing.
After grabbing a flashlight from the glove compartment, she peeled herself out of the jeep to assess the damage, nearly face planting in the snow. She stumbled to the front of the car then winced as the light splayed across the grill. The right, front bumper had folded into the hood like an accordion.
Ella patted the car, apologized, then realized she was talking to a car, all alone, in the middle of the night. Maybe if her car actually was Herbie the Love Bug, she’d feel less crazy.
Swiping loose strands of curly, brown hair away from her face, she shivered against the cold creeping through her thin layers and hiked back to the driver-side door. She leaned over the seat and turned the key in the ignition. The engine whined and sputtered but wouldn’t turn over. Apparently, smooshing a car wasn’t good for an engine.
She checked her cell phone, not surprised when it had no bars. This part of the mountain pass was notorious for lousy reception—that and Bigfoot. But she’d never really believed the latter.
Think, Ella.
One thing was clear, unless she suddenly grew muscles, she wouldn’t be able to get the car out without a tow truck. And she couldn’t call a tow truck without cell reception.
She could wait for someone to come along the highway, but there were three problems with that plan—well four if she counted the fact that it was freaking cold.
First, this particular highway wasn’t the popular option for traveling over the mountain range, lessening her chances of a passerby.
Second, it was just after midnight. Chances were remote that another vehicle would drive past.
Third, no engine meant no heat, which reminded her of the fourth problem.
With those uplifting thoughts, she slipped her arms into her down jacket and zipped it up. She was going to have to walk for help, Bigfoot be damned.
When she’d last had a signal, GPS had shown her twenty miles from the nearest town. However, she knew from previous trips that there were small cabins tucked into the woods along the route. Maybe she’d get lucky.
She shut the door. Her boots crunched in the snow as she spun a slow circle, letting the flashlight splay over her surroundings. It was then that she noticed the vehicle had landed a yard away from the strange line of demarcation of snowy road and grass.
Ella shivered against the cold biting her exposed cheeks and crept forward. Her brows pinched together. The road really did just end.
The storm had abated over the last few minutes. Small flakes now drifted lazily to the lush blades of untouched grass where they stuck like freckles.
How? In winter, how was there green grass? And bare of any snow, here, where several feet of drifts lay behind her? And what on earth had happened to the road?
Ella dug her snow boot down through the ice and snow and found the edge of the asphalt as if it had been sheared off. Her face scrunched up as she tried to recall if she’d had any of her father’s spiced rum. Nope, unfortunately, she was definitely sober.
She shook her head against the onslaught of questions and the mental gymnastics her brain was doing to answer them. She had more immediate concerns, like trying to stay warm.
Opening the trunk of her jeep, she grabbed her backpack loaded with the clothes from her Thanksgiving weekend at her parents’ house. After shoving her cell phone into her jacket pocket, she tugged a beanie over her ears and prepared to hike through the frigid landscape for help.
The beam from her flashlight swathed over the icy road behind her then to the now snow-speckled grass ahead. Which way?
Since she couldn’t recall having passed any cabins in the last several miles, she decided to plunge ahead into the strange, foreign landscape glittering in the cold. Because, when in doubt, go towards the creepy Twilight Zone landscape.
As her boots crunched through the snow, Ella’s thoughts turned to the mystery, trying to make sense of it. She’d driven this highway dozens of times. How could it just disappear? And be replaced by sod untouched by the storm?
Ella pushed her shoulders back, situated her backpack, and stepped onto the frozen grass. It crunched under her boots like soft whispers that shattered the night.
The trees fell away on either side. She pushed the light their way, but it couldn’t touch the darkness.
After she’d hiked for a few minutes, a faint, amber light indicative of a town glowed on the horizon. The short burst of elation she felt quickly turned to confusion.
There wasn’t supposed to be a town here. Then again, there was supposed to be a grass here. Either she’d made a wrong turn or had misjudged how far she’d gone after losing satellite signal.
At some point, the snow had stopped falling. And now the moon glowed behind a cloud. The dusting of snow over the landscape glittered, reminding Ella of powdered sugar. Her mouth watered at the thought while her stomach turned in protest, still digesting the pumpkin pie.
The increased ambient light allowed Ella to make out her surroundings for the first time. Gone were the mountains and evergreens, replaced by fields.
Unease gripped her stomach as she plunged ahead. A half-mile later, she passed a dark barn. Large, white poles surrounded the structure and winked at her when her beam swept over them. Dozens of them.
Ella walked to the nearest one and tipped her head back until it filled her vision.
“Whoa,” she whispered. “Definitely made a wrong turn.”
Large blades half the size of her car rotated gently in the night, blotting and revealing clouds along their circular journey. The wind turbine creaked and sighed.
Ella turned and squinted at the dozens of other similar wind turbines. She was standing in the middle of a large wind farm.
After staring for another minute, she began trekking again, her body warming from the exertion. The glowing haze she’d been aiming for had diverged into the smattering of porch lights and streetlights of a small town.
Ella paused to take in the beautiful sight, but mostly to catch her breath. That pie really wasn’t sitting well.
Before her, a hard, cold ground sloped down and crashed into a small lake—or large pond, she couldn’t be sure. When does a pond become a lake?
Antique street lamps and sleeping houses lined the perimeter of the lake-pond.
Ella ambled to the left, away from what she was now generously calling a lake, towards a street. She walked through puddles of warm light from gas lamps, eyeing quaint shops with their dark windows on either side. The town oozed of days past, of an era untouched by time, and remarkably restored.
An old-fashioned barber pole—still in great condition—hung outside one of the buildings. The words “Sal’s Barbershop” were painted across the window.
A leaf rustled over the pavement and skittered under a parked car. Ella’s eyes bugged out when she saw the vintage Mustang. Her fingers longed to slide over the pristine paint, and she wasn’t even that into cars—unless it was Herbie apparently.
As charming as the town seemed, there was something really off about the place, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
A sign posted along the sidewalk caught her eye. It read, “Visitors, turn back. Leave now.”
Ella’s brows drew together as she picked over each letter again, sure she’d read it wrong. What kind of town asked visitors to leave?
She checked her cell phone again. Oddly, there was still no reception. She would have to use a landline to call a tow truck.
With a sigh, she left the welcoming sign behind in search of a house—any house, but preferably one with lights on. However, the street she was on seemed full of nothing but sleeping shops.
She was just considering trying a side street when she came across her first house—only house wasn’t the right word. Mansion.
It, along with a double-wide, vintage railcar diner, took up the entire block.
The two-story mansion appeared to be from the late 1800s and beautifully restored. English ivy crawled over the rust-colored brick exterior and around the windows. If an English manor had an affair with a Federal style house from the south, Ella decided, this would be their offspring. It even had two turrets.
The building seemed older than anything she’d come across thus far, stoic as if it had always been and the town had grown around it. More importantly, warm light spilled from the home’s windows.
A wrought iron arch over the walkway read, “Keystone Inn.” For a brief moment, Ella puzzled over the presence of an inn in a town that didn’t want visitors before inwardly shrugging it off.
The gate opened with a soft creak, and she followed the path that bisected a small garden.
Well, if they didn’t want visitors, that was too bad. Her feet ached and her muscles were exhausted. The inn was going to have one more guest that night.
Ella picked her way over the garden path and bounded up the stoop. She fought a chill that crawled over her skin, and she told herself it was due to the temperature and had nothing to do with the strange, old inn.
Her hand hesitated over the large oak door, unsure if she should use the brass knocker or the doorknob. She tried her luck with the knob first, and it turned freely. The door yawned open, creaking in the night.
I’m in a horror movie. And this is the part where I die, she thought.
Warmth enveloped Ella like a blanket. She quickly slipped inside and closed the door behind her. She shook off her silly fears and told herself if she was going to die, at least she’d be warm doing it.
An entrance hall opened before her that was roughly the size of her living room. Her gaze drew to an ornate crystal chandelier that probably cost as much as her student loans.
On her right, a large staircase wound up and out of sight. Three doors stood open around the perimeter of the room, along with three hallways. Her ears pricked at the crackle of a fireplace and noticed light flickering from beyond one of the thresholds.
She crept forward and poked her head into the room. “Hello?”
She had never seen a study in person, but that’s what the room appeared to be. It was empty of anyone, a fire dying in the hearth.
