Ring In the Year with Murder--An Otter Lake Mystery

by Auralee Wallace

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  The Morning After

  My head. My head. My head!

  I untangled one of my arms from the mess of sheets that had me wrapped like a mummy, then dug the heel of my palm into my temple.

  Ow.

  Why…? How…? What happened?

  I mean, clearly, I was dying. It felt like someone had buried their hatchet in my head for safekeeping, but …

  … wait a minute …

  New Year’s.

  That’s right. It was New Year’s Eve … or maybe New Year’s Day judging by the sunlight burning through my eyelids.

  I pushed off the duvet and sheets still covering me and blinked my swollen eyelids open.

  Huh.

  While we were on the topic of unusual things, this … this was not my room.

  It was way too nice to be my room.

  Exposed wood beams held up a white-painted ceiling. An artsy miniature sailboat sat on top of a bookshelf. There was even a rich-people rocking chair. Don’t ask me how you can tell the difference between a rich person’s rocking chair and every other rocking chair. You just can.

  But the room was elegant in a distant kind of way. No personal photos. No clothes. No books lying around half read. This had to be a guest room.

  How much did I drink?

  Wait … why did I drink?

  I wasn’t supposed to be drinking!

  I pressed my hands harder into the sides of my head. There was a lot I was having trouble remembering, but the one thing I did know for sure was that I had explicitly vowed not to drink this New Year’s. We were on duty. Not to mention the fact that drinking while in the presence of one’s ex and one’s ex’s new girlfriend was a high-risk activity for humiliation. Everybody knew that.

  So what the heck was going on?

  I jolted against the bed when I heard what sounded like a chain saw start up next to me.

  Okay, so let me rephrase that earlier question.

  What the heck was going on and who was snoring beside me?

  It only took a second to place that deviated septum. And it only took that long because I had obviously suffered brain damage. I gave the air a sniff. Champagne-induced brain damage by the smell of it. Maybe with some tequila? Oh boy, things must have gone really, really wrong if I drank tequila. I rolled over in the unknown bed, which may have been the most painful thing I had ever done in my entire life, and whacked the fur-covered shoulder of my sleeping companion. His snore cut off with a snort. He coughed. Then groaned.

  “Freddie,” I croaked.

  Nothing.

  I cleared my throat and went for something a little louder, but not so loud as to rupture a blood vessel. “Freddie.”

  The fur-clad figure rolled on his back, and blinked a few times. “Where am I?”

  “I think…” I had to pause a moment. The act of talking caused a slight increase in blood pressure, which made the back of my eyeballs feel like they were being stabbed with a million tiny knives. “Matthew’s. We’re still at Matthew’s.”

  It was the most likely option. The New Year’s party was at Hemlock Estate, and this room screamed money.

  “Why are we in bed together? And why did you dress me in a fur?”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head, instantly realizing that all movement was very, very bad. I made a noncommittal noise in the back of my throat—which was also bad. I nearly threw up. I would have argued against taking responsibility for dressing Freddie in anything, let alone a fur, but it wasn’t worth the effort.

  He struggled up onto his elbow to look over at me. Horror spread across his face.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You’re wearing a turban.”

  “A what?” I reached up and pulled the gold satin monstrosity off my head. It had dangling strings of fake pearls sewn to the front. Pearls!

  “Wait…” Freddie’s eyes darted around the room before landing back on me. Oh wow. He’d slept in his contacts. The capillaries in the whites of his eyes pulsed a bright red. That had to hurt. He might need surgery to get those puppies off. “Something’s coming back to me.”

  “What?”

  Freddie almost sat up but thought better of it real quick. “Didn’t we…? Wasn’t there…?” Suddenly he gasped and sat up for real this time. “My dog!”

  My dog? Oh right … Stanley, I think his name was. Freddie had brought a dog to the party. At least one of us had a date. I watched Freddie roll out of bed, falling hard onto his knees. With the gigantic fur coat he was wearing, he looked a lot like a hungover bear … if bears actually got hungover. He then crawled over to the small furry creature sleeping by the cold fireplace. The French bulldog lifted his head, totally encased with a plastic cone, and swiveled it toward him.

  “Are you all right, puppy?” Freddie crooned in a baby voice—which was just wrong. Freddie didn’t like the dog. Freddie had a history with dogs. In fact, he was just watching the dog until the pound reopened after the holidays. Seriously, what was going on? How long had I been asleep? Not that it felt like sleep. It felt more like I had been in a coma. And why was the dog wearing a cone of shame? And did I need to borrow the cone of shame for the snowmobile ride home? Oh God, I couldn’t handle a snowmobile …

  Freddie rolled to his side on the floor, his one hand still on Stanley’s back, and pulled out his phone. The strangest look came over his face as he swiped at the screen. “What the…?”

  “What? What is it?”

  “I have … wait.” He poked at his phone a few more times. “In the last twenty-four hours, I got sixty thousand new followers on Twitter.”

  “What? Why? What did you do?”

  “I don’t know,” Freddie said, looking both bewildered and nauseous. He collapsed back onto the floor, letting his hand flop to the side. “Wait … something else is coming back to me.”

  “What?”

  “Did you…?”

  My stomach dropped then bounced right back up. “Did I what?”

  “Did you … kill someone?”

  “What?!” Ow. Ow. Ow. Yelling was bad. Very bad. “No, I didn’t kill anyone.” I sounded pretty certain, even though some strange images were coalescing into memories. But given the way my body felt, I was thinking a more likely scenario was that someone had tried to kill me. And it wasn’t just the epic hangover. My elbows hurt. A lot. Like the skin had peeled off them. And my knees. My fingers and toes too. Not to mention the fact that my ankle felt funny. Almost like …

  I struggled to get my one foot out from under the sheets, but it kept catching. My shoe maybe? It didn’t feel like I was wearing a shoe. I peeked over the side of the bed. No shoes. One boot, though. I finally managed to kick my foot free. Holy …

  “Hey! Somebody cuffed you!” Freddie nearly sat all the way up before dropping back to the floor with a
groan.

  “These can’t be real,” I said, curling myself in a ball to bring my ankle to my face. I squinted at the shiny metal. Huh. Otter Lake Police Department. Well, that wasn’t reassuring.

  “Are you sure you didn’t kill anyone?” Freddie asked. “A call girl maybe? From a bachelor party?”

  “That’s a movie, Freddie.”

  “Then why is there police tape outside?”

  I tilted up and peeked one eye open at the glaring light coming from the window. Hmm, Freddie was right. Those fluttering strips of yellow and black plastic probably weren’t New Year’s streamers. Man, it looked like the whole yard was marked off. I suddenly had a really, really terrible feeling that somehow this was our fault. Why was it always our fault?

  “Freddie,” I said as calmly as I could. “What did you make us do last night?”

  “Me? What did I make us do last night? You’re the one who killed the call girl!”

  “Nobody killed a call girl!” I couldn’t help but shout. I didn’t care anymore if it killed me. In fact, a big part of me welcomed death. “You knew I wanted to lay low at this party! And you double dog knew I didn’t want to do anything embarrassing in front of Grady and Candace! So help me if you made me kill someone, and Grady saw it…” About halfway through that speech I realized I wasn’t making a whole lot of sense.

  “Double dog knew?” Freddie snickered. “That’s a lot of knew.”

  “Oh my God! Shut up!” I closed my eyes again. “My brain. It hurts so much.” It was then I noticed a big glass of water and a bottle of pain pills on the nightstand beside the bed. “We need to get up. We need to find somebody who knows what happened last night. We need to find a key for these handcuffs.”

  “Oh relax,” Freddie groaned. “I need a minute. Besides, I don’t think you killed anyone. The police would have nabbed you by now. It doesn’t look like we made a run for it. Plus … I think you’d be bloodier.”

  I groaned. My body didn’t want to get up either.

  “That being said, I do feel that something murdery happened last night.”

  We fell into silence.

  “Oh my God!” Freddie suddenly shouted.

  “What? Who murdered who? Is somebody dead?”

  “Forget the murder.”

  “Forget the murder?”

  “We need to talk about the kiss!”

  I froze. “The kiss? What kiss? I don’t remember any kiss.” I brought my fingers to my lips. They felt kind of kissed. Or maybe just swollen. With evil, evil champagne.

  “How could you forget the kiss? It was epic.”

  I squinted again against the harsh sunlight.

  Think, Erica. Think.

  My brain had forgotten how to do that.

  Hmm, let’s see. Kiss. Kissing. Kissed.

  A tidal wave of hot and cold emotion rushed over me.

  I did kiss someone.

  Freddie was right. There was no way I could have forgotten that kiss. All the champagne in the world wouldn’t stop me from remembering that kiss.

  But who did I kiss?

  “So…?”

  I shook my head. So much confusion. “Okay, we need to back way, way up here.”

  “Right.”

  “Let’s start from the beginning. So we pulled up to the estate on your snowmobile—”

  “And you came up with that weird resolution.”

  Chapter One

  “The Year of the Adult?”

  “Yeah,” I said, carefully navigating my way up the stone steps of the stately home. They were well salted, but my low strappy heels weren’t great climbing shoes. “And it’s not so much a resolution as a theme.”

  “A theme?” Freddie asked, stopping to look at me. He was having his own trouble with the steps given the furry bundle in his arms.

  “For the New Year.”

  “Right.”

  Once I got safely to the top, I took a moment to look around. It was so pretty out here tonight. Floodlights, half buried in snow, lit up the house while twinkly lights sparkled in the trees. Hemlock Estate was always impressive, but tonight, all lit up, it was magical. Well, except for maybe the ice carvings left over from the winter carnival that took place here last week. They were looking a little worse for wear. The temperature had gone up and down quite a bit in the past few days. In fact, the moose carving kind of looked like it needed to be put out of its misery. The ice slide for the kids was looking a little warped too.

  “So what exactly does this theme entail?”

  “I think the title is pretty self-explanatory. This is going to be the year I get myself together. You know, practice adulting.” I smiled at the little French bulldog in Freddie’s arms. He was much easier to talk to with his nonjudgey dog face. “I’m going to make good decisions. I’m going to take that contract court-reporting job in—”

  Freddie swatted me on the arm. “What about Otter Lake Security?”

  “Um, ow,” I said, rubbing the spot where he’d smacked me. Otter Lake Security. Our fledgling company. Our fledgling company that we were having a really hard time getting off the ground. The main problem was that we weren’t legally allowed to do much more than watch over farmer’s markets, and, really, farmer’s markets didn’t need a whole lot of security. We wanted to get into more private investigation—cheating spouses and insurance fraud, that’s where the money was—but our other partner, Rhonda Cooke, was the only one of us who qualified for a license. She had applied for it a while back, but it still hadn’t come through. Once it did, though, we’d be taking pictures of people in motel rooms and picking through garbage like nobody’s business. “If you’re worried about this job taking away from all the time we spend discussing the business while eating pizza and drinking beer, I’m pretty sure we can still fit that in.”

  “No, I don’t like this idea,” Freddie said. “I’ve got big plans for us.”

  “Hey, I do too,” I said. “But in the meantime, I’m almost out of savings, and I need to find a place of my own. I really can’t live at the retreat anymore.” Currently I was living with my mother in my childhood home, which also doubled as her business—an island getaway for spiritual healing. And while I was really grateful to be home, let’s just say my mother and I were on much better terms when we had more space. The other day she accidentally jammed her baby finger up my nose while breaking into a spontaneous tree pose. “Then after I find my own place, I’ll start exercising, eating healthy—”

  “Boring.”

  “Oh! And I’m going to start taking care of myself. You know, be one of those women who never forgets to shave her legs and uses hand cream and always has those small packages of tissues ready to go. Those women really have it together.”

  Freddie frowned at me a moment before finally saying, “That sounds awful. You’re terrible at resolutions.”

  “Hey! No I’m not. And it’s not a resolution. It’s a theme.” A pretty awesome theme. “In fact, I think you should do the Year of the Adult with me.” I stamped my feet lightly. My toes were going numb.

  “No, thank you. I don’t want to shave my legs, and I’d actually like to have fun this year.” Freddie thrust the dog in his arms toward me. “Here, hold this thing for a second. My tux is all twisted from the ride over.”

  I reached out for the pup. “Come here, you.” He was such a wee little furry piglet with the most adorable white and brown patches. “Hey,” I said, looking back up, “you never told me his name.”

  Freddie reached under one of the cuffs of his overcoat and tugged at the sleeves of his suit jacket before straightening the white silk scarf that fell over his lapels. “Stanley? Sully? Steve? I don’t remember.”

  I blinked at him. “You don’t remember?”

  “Why would I remember the name of a dog that’s going to the pound asap?”

  Freddie Ng. Best friend. Business partner. One-time online fortune-teller. Also temporary dog owner, which, I guess, made him a likely candidate for the next Disney cartoon villa
in. In all seriousness, though, Freddie had a painful history with dogs, so I was willing to cut him some slack. In fact, it was that painful history that got him into his current temporary dog ownership predicament. “Okay, but in the meantime, we have to call him something.” I brought my nose closer to the dog’s button one. “I think we should call you Killer. Because you’re so cute.”

  “Killer? Really?” Freddie shuddered. “Don’t ever have children.” He brushed some nonexistent dirt from his arm. “Let’s just go with Stanley.”

  I peered into the dog’s big round eyes. “Is that your name? Stanley?”

  The dog licked my face. Unfortunately it was one of those dog licks that catches you right under your top lip and ends up at your nostrils.

  “And that’s how you get flesh-eating disease,” Freddie said, reaching for the door. He suddenly stopped mid-motion and squinted at me. “You’re oddly cheery tonight. What’s going on with you?”

  “What do you mean, what’s going on with me? It’s New Year’s Eve! Time for new beginnings. Fresh starts. Of course I’m cheery.”

  “You weren’t this cheery a couple of days ago,” Freddie said, raising a suspicious eyebrow. “In fact, I’m pretty sure you said something about New Year’s always being a letdown. That it was a whole bunch of hype for something that lasts ten seconds. I remember because it got me worried about your sex life.”

  I frowned.

  “What’s more,” Freddie went on, “you were the one who originally suggested we skip this party and spend the night watching Japanese game shows where people get knocked off of inflatable gauntlets into lakes.”

  “That was before we got hired to keep an eye on things here. And by the way, I stand by my original idea. Game shows are an awesome way to spend New Year’s.” I blew some warm air into my hands, Stanley still huddled in my arms. “But, you know, this is good too.”

  “No. No.” Freddie’s eyebrow was still cocked. “I think you might have even said that you hated New Year’s.”

  “I did not. That’s ridiculous.”

  “And I suppose you’re not the least bit worried about seeing Grady and Candace ring in the New Year? With their lips?”