Dangerous Curves Boxed Set 1: 3 Cozy Christian Mysteries

by K L Montgomery

  “Gotcha. Okay, who’s up next? Molly?”

  All eyes snapped to my curvy blonde friend, who chose to remain in her comfy seat in the armchair between the sofa and loveseat. Bond snoozed above her head on the back of the chair, his tail twitching sporadically as she began to summarize her section, “This part talked about how she got into beekeeping and gardening. She discussed the wildflower meadow and hiring a professional apiculturist to come in and set up her hives. She also talked about deciding to sell her honey commercially and how her husband wasn’t having it, but she was getting bored staying at home all day with the kids, who were older and in school by this point. So she went against Piers’ wishes and signed up to participate in the Mid-Atlantic Food Vendor Expo.”

  “The honey convention,” I noted, and Vincent murmured agreement.

  “The year was 1976,” Molly noted. “She spent at least a chapter talking about how devastatingly handsome Mr. Boxbury was, but, alas, he was married. She did her best to ignore her growing attraction to him, but apparently it was just too intense.” She sighed as though it was such a romantic notion, even though we all knew it led to Mrs. Monroe committing adultery, which shouldn’t be romanticized, of course.

  “Then what?” Evangeline asked, seemingly growing bored with this game.

  “Well, there are a few shockingly graphic parts.” Molly’s cheeks flushed as she looked down at her notes. “I don’t think you need any details about how she and Mr. Boxbury…uh…connected on an intimate level.”

  Yikes. I wasn’t expecting Mrs. Monroe to go there.

  “And…uh…that was about it,” she finished, breathing out a sigh that sounded a lot like relief.

  “You’re up, Boss Lady,” I said to Evangeline, who grunted in response.

  “I’ve gotta say, there was some pretty messed-up crap in here. But I’ll do my best to give an executive summary.”

  “Please do.” I laced my fingers together, hoping that whatever she had to report would make the parts I read make more sense.

  “Well, first of all, show of hands, who is surprised that she got pregnant?”

  Nobody’s hand went up.

  “That sounds about right,” Jada corroborated.

  “Anyway, apparently Carlton was thrilled because his wife had only ever been able to have the one son. So, here’s when things got weird…”

  We were all hanging on the edges of our sofa cushions, waiting to hear the next tantalizing bit of this sordid tale.

  “She went to Europe with Carlton to have the baby, which apparently happened in Paris. It was a boy, and they named him Bryce, but…”

  So far, this matched what I’d been thinking. I was anxious to hear what this “but” was about.

  “While they were in Europe, a few noteworthy things went down stateside,” Evangeline continued.

  “Go on,” Chief James implored. I could tell his patience level was just about on par with mine, in that it was barely there.

  “Carlton’s wife confronted Piers Monroe, Willa’s husband, about the affair and the baby. Apparently Piers had been so busy traveling and getting caught up in his business affairs, he didn’t even care what was going on with his wife, and he didn’t seem to care if the entire town was talking about it.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Vincent interjected, “but go on.”

  “Carlton’s wife, Mildred was her name, was so incensed, she demanded that Piers force his wife to return to the States. Besides, there was another situation brewing…”

  “Such as?” Molly’s body was practically quivering with suspense.

  “Carlton and Mildred’s son had been coming around to hang out with Willa and Piers’ daughter, Matilda, and I don’t have to tell you how that turned out.”

  “She got pregnant too?” Jada guessed.

  “Yep,” I answered before my boss could.

  “So…” Evangeline looked down at her notes, but she may have just been pausing for effect, to draw out the drama. I had a feeling whatever she said next was going to explain what I had read and would make all of the evidence coalesce.

  “Come on! Out with it!” we all harassed her.

  She snickered before taking a long drag on her water bottle. “Sorry, I’m a little dehydrated… Anyway, apparently Willa and Carlton came back from Paris, and one night, the four of them—both couples—hashed out all the details of their agreement. Needless to say, Willa got the short end of the stick.”

  “What do you mean?” I pressed.

  “Carlton and Mildred were going to keep the baby Willa had given birth to in Paris. This was in exchange for not disclosing to anyone that Willa had another man’s child. And they also agreed not to spread the rumor about Matilda getting pregnant…”

  “Wait!” I interjected. “I don’t understand why Willa would agree to any of that? She wasn’t exactly a pushover. I know it was a different time, but—”

  “Here’s why,” Evangeline explained. “Her husband, Piers, had taken almost all of her assets into his name, unbeknownst to her, when they got married. He’d drawn up an agreement that stated if she ever had an affair, he would assume all of her assets, divorce her, and she would be penniless. She’d even lose the house that had been in her family for nearly a century, not to mention the property her family had owned for nearly four hundred years.”

  “Wow!” Jada exclaimed. “That’s horrible!”

  “That’s not even the worst part,” Evangeline continued, “because it’s hard to understand why she would risk all that to cavort with another man, right?”

  “True,” I said, “but it doesn’t sound like she actually knew what was at stake—that she would lose everything. Otherwise, why be so open about it?”

  Molly, Jada and Chief James all nodded in agreement.

  “Right, she didn’t know about her assets being in jeopardy until the night of their negotiation. He presented her with the legal agreements she had apparently signed—she’d been told, when she signed them, they were life insurance policies for her and the children. But here’s the kicker, and why she’d been so brazen about the affair: after she got pregnant, Carlton promised her, if she bore him a child, he would divorce Mildred, and he would marry Willa. But when the four of them all gathered in the library there in her Victorian mansion to cut a deal, he completely betrayed her. She lost him and her baby.”

  A collective gasp went up around the room.

  I had tears in my eyes thinking about how hopeless her situation must have seemed at the time. “Oh, that’s heartbreaking! She wrote in her journal about her sacrifice, and that must have been what she meant. She sacrificed her child to keep her marriage intact and her family’s legacy in her name. The whole town is named for her family, after all.”

  “She could have ruined Carlton too,” Jada pointed out. “Especially after he lied to her like that…”

  “This memoir,” Chief James said, “I’m starting to understand why Carlton didn’t want it to be published.”

  “Right? It doesn’t paint him in a very good light, does it?” Molly agreed.

  I shook my head, trying to imagine how Mrs. Monroe must have suffered to give up her baby and her love. She had loved him.

  “Anything else?” Vincent asked Evangeline.

  “Isn’t that enough?” she scoffed.

  “Jada, you’re up next. What about the next part?” I was hoping to get more information about Matilda and Carlton Boxbury, Jr. in this section. I still didn’t understand what happened to him.

  Jada stood up to deliver the news: “Well, brace yourself, folks, because it’s only going to get weirder from here on out.”

  Seventeen

  Jada patted her springy copper-colored curls as she prepared to give us her book report. “So, where we left off is that Willa had just gotten screwed out of her relationship and her newborn baby, but that wasn’t all that happened. Matilda was pregnant, and she blamed her mother—who might have been the wrong scapegoat, but surely neither of them deser
ved what the men decided to do with her baby.”

  “Do tell,” Chief James interjected, his dark brows arching.

  “Having just gotten a newborn of their own, Carlton and Mildred wanted nothing to do with the consequences of their son’s dalliance. Plus, he had just been accepted into Princeton, and they didn’t want anything ruining his college career. So they shipped him off to college, and Piers Monroe insisted on shipping his daughter off to California, to some ritzy maternity home for rich unwed mothers who needed to avoid a scandal back home.

  “And there was a whole chapter about Willa’s postpartum depression that set in after her child was ripped away from her. Piers apparently moved out for a while and wouldn’t even speak with her about what happened. Nathaniel, their son, was away at school, and then Matilda was gone as well. She literally had no one, and that is when she began to get so involved in civic activities. Do you know the first place she found her tribe?”

  “Where?” we all chorused.

  “Bryce Beach Public Library,” Jada relayed with a beaming smile. “She joined the Friends of the Library committee, and even went on to chair it. She is the one who came up with the idea of having an annual gala.”

  “Oh, my heart!” My hand flew to my chest. Despite all the mistakes she had made, Willa was such a sympathetic character. I wished I’d known all of this about her before her untimely death.

  “So what happened to Matilda’s baby?” Molly questioned.

  “I’m getting to that.” Jada glanced down at her notes. “Matilda went to California for her pregnancy, and after the baby was born, they shipped Matilda back. Neither Matilda nor her mother knew what had become of the baby.”

  “What?!” I shrieked. “So who did?”

  “Apparently Piers made the arrangements, but Mrs. Monroe didn’t know until years later where the baby ended up.”

  “I think that happens in my section,” I piped up.

  “Go on, Jada,” Chief James kept us on track.

  “So two big things of note…”

  “Yes?”

  “First, Carlton Boxbury, Jr., who got Matilda pregnant and then went off to Princeton… He never forgave his parents or the Monroes for forcing him to break up with Matilda. He was truly in love with her. He disowned his parents after he graduated from college, changed his name, and was never heard from again.”

  “Wow…”

  “Wait, I thought he runs Boxbury Seafood Company?” Evangeline asked, her brows wrinkling in confusion. “And he’s married to Amanda Boxbury…right?”

  “Nope,” I interjected. “That’s the child Willa carried, and Carlton and Mildred raised. His first name on his birth certificate is Bryce.”

  “What?! That is seriously messed up!” Evangeline shook her head.

  “I told you!” Jada chuckled as she glanced back down at her notes. “She wrote about how she tried to contact him when he was in high school, old enough to understand what happened, but Mildred intercepted her letters and destroyed them.”

  “So sad!” I gasped. “Imagine having a child who doesn’t know you’re his mother, and you can’t communicate with him at all—and you never voluntarily gave him up. What a terrible thing! Even if she did have an affair, she didn’t deserve that.”

  “Okay, so, one more thing that happened, and it’s a doozy,” Jada said, making everyone’s eyes go wide with suspense. “Not long before Piers passed, he made a confession to his wife.”

  “And?” We were all hanging on every single one of Jada’s words.

  “You guys are going to love this.” She giggled and scanned her notes for a second, maybe to make sure she got the details right, maybe just to make us suffer. “Remember how Piers had drawn up all those legal documents to take Willa’s assets if she was ever unfaithful?”

  We all nodded.

  “Once she decided to pursue the honey thing, he was so mad about it, he actually looked for someone to tempt her with, someone to seduce her,” Jada revealed.

  “Are you serious?” Molly shook her head. “That’s nuts!”

  “He knew Carlton from some local business leaders organization, and, get this, he bribed him to seduce his wife!”

  “Get out of town!” I screamed. I now understood why she was so angry with Carlton in her journal. Besides breaking his promise to leave his wife for her, their entire relationship had been fake from the beginning. And she had fallen for him head over heels.

  “Piers gave Carlton the property he later built his Fernville seafood plant on,” Jada continued. “I don’t know if I have ever heard of anything crazier than that.”

  “I mean, it doesn’t speak highly of Piers at all, but it makes Carlton look even worse,” Evangeline said.

  “No wonder he didn’t want this memoir published,” Vincent added for the second time.

  “That’s not even all of it.” Jada’s eyes slid back down to her notes before she returned them to her captivated audience. “Apparently the two of them had a huge falling out when Carlton decided to go back to Mildred after the baby was born—because that meant Piers wasn’t getting rid of Willa and gaining control of all of her assets like he’d been planning. See, Willa was much, much richer than he was.”

  “Why didn’t Willa just leave him?” Evangeline crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t understand why she stayed with him.”

  “The legal documents Piers drew up, I’d imagine,” I conjectured. “She might have had trouble getting a judge to believe she signed them under false pretenses. She probably felt like she had to stay with him to keep her family’s legacy intact.”

  “Plus, divorce wasn’t as easy back then—not that it’s easy now, of course, but it was more difficult and steeped in even more stigma than it is now,” Chief James theorized. “Especially for women. Ladies of her generation often didn’t believe in divorce. She probably felt trapped—and the financial situation where she stood to lose her inheritance and property didn’t help.”

  “I’m sure her faith had something to do with it as well. She felt guilty for her affair, for breaking her marriage vows,” I added. “The passage I read, she confessed that she was getting what she deserved.”

  “After the falling out, when Piers confronted Carlton for reneging on his promises, Carlton paid Piers off, gave him some hush money. It was apparently close to a million dollars. I imagine that softened the blow that he wouldn’t be gaining control of Willa’s money,” Jada offered.

  “Yep, I’m sure he didn’t want that out in public either,” I said. “Is that all, Jada?”

  “To quote Evangeline, ‘isn’t that enough?’” She giggled. “I think it’s your turn to wrap this up, Sunshine.”

  Now I was seeing the whole picture and was beginning to understand how we could leverage this information to get our murderer to come forward. There was still some legwork to do, but before we tackled that, I was going to put the final puzzle piece in place for my intrepid band of investigators.

  “The final section of Mrs. Monroe’s memoir chronicles all the charity work she did in Bryce Beach, and then the moment this spring that everything changed.” I looked from face to face, heightening the suspense before continuing my report.

  “She received a letter from a woman in California who identified herself as a family friend. She claimed to know what became of Matilda and Carlton Jr.’s long-lost son.”

  “Get out!” Molly shouted, clearly about to burst.

  “Through the agreement he made with Carlton, Mr. Monroe sent the child to live with his nephew out in California. He and his wife were childless, and Piers wanted them to have a child to raise. Here’s a creepy tidbit: they named Matilda’s kid Carlton Piers Monroe, after his two grandfathers. He got the name Monroe because Willa’s baby became a Boxbury. It seemed to work out just fine for the baby and his adoptive parents, who had the same last name. The kid was super smart with big round glasses, which earned him the nickname Owl. Not very many people knew his real name, and naturally, that far west, no
one knew who Piers Monroe or Carlton Boxbury were anyway.

  “Mrs. Monroe wrote about how heartbreaking it was to know her daughter, Matilda, the child’s mother, was out there all those years in California, never knowing her son was there too. They only lived a couple towns apart, apparently.”

  “But couldn’t they reunite now?” Molly asked, excitement edging her voice. “It’s never too late, right? This memoir could bring them together.”

  “That’s why the woman contacted Mrs. Monroe. She was a family friend, like I said, and apparently, long ago, Owl’s true identity was shared with her. She was told his birth mother was a teen and couldn’t raise him, and that she was the adoptive father’s cousin who lived on the East Coast. The adoptive parents were older, and they passed away when Owl was in his twenties. He grew up and married a woman named Angela Thomas, and they had a son of their own.”

  Chief James looked down at his feet, and if I wasn’t mistaken, he was a little choked up with emotion because, like me, he knew where this was going. My three colleagues, however, had no clue how this story ended.

  “Owl and Angela moved to the East Coast a couple of years ago—Owl had a business opportunity in Cherry Grove. He didn’t realize he had extended family out east, at least not that we know of. Or maybe he had been told, and he chose not to make contact with his relatives on the Monroe side. With all that family drama, could you blame him? In any case, the family friend didn’t seem to know the exact situation.”

  “Why do I feel like something bad happened?” Molly gripped the pillow next to her so tight that her knuckles turned white.

  “The family friend was writing to let Mrs. Monroe know that Owl and Angela had been killed in an auto accident, and they’d left behind a child, a son, who was only fifteen years old.” I stopped there, swallowing down the lump that had grown in my throat.

  “You might know the son…Mrs. Monroe’s long-lost great-grandson…”

  “Who is it?” Molly asked.

  “Knox Monroe.”

  I expected gasps, but instead there was silence. The young man who had come into our community, who had no idea of his family history, was the key to Mrs. Monroe’s murder.