Snowflake Bay Cozy Mysteries Boxset 1

by C Farren

  Half an hour later Aarna was looking a little more refreshed. Fiona had made something in the kitchen that instantly cured Aarna’s hangover. The angel didn’t say what she put in it, but did state she used to make it regularly for her father. Wren didn’t like to press the matter. It was obviously a sensitive subject.

  “How are you doing?” Wren asked.

  “You should’ve just left me,” Aarna muttered miserably.

  “Where were you the night Garrett died?” Fiona shouted.

  Wren gave her friend a cautious look. “Perhaps now is not the time to be flinging around accusations. You know how that went with Sheriff Fisher.”

  “You accusing Sheriff Fisher of murder helped him to come out to his son and made him a better person. He had a catharsis because of you.”

  Sheriff Fisher did seem a little less burdened after telling his son the truth. Perhaps her callously accusing him of cold-blooded murder in a public place had been worth it?

  “Do you think I killed Garrett?” Aarna asked.

  “You did tell me you thought it was your fault that he died,” said Wren.

  “That’s because it me who started all this off in the first place.” Aarna rubbed her arm anxiously. “I was the one who bought Jordan that DNA ancestry kit. I only did it for a laugh! I didn’t expect it to turn out like this.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Jordan killed him, didn’t he? He was so angry when he found out Garrett wasn’t his father. I’d never seen him like that before. It scared me. We’d always been such good friends. You know we dated in high school?”

  “Why did you break up if he was so wonderful?” Fiona asked.

  “He cheated on me.” She looked uncomfortable for a moment. “But it was okay. I got over it. Like I said, we became friends.”

  The woman was lying. Nobody got over being cheated on, and it was obvious by the look on her face. It still hurt her even now.

  “You really think Jordan killed his father?” Wren asked.

  “Like I said, he was angry,” said Aarna. “I honestly thought he had killed him when I found out Garrett was dead.”

  “But what about now?”

  She shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. Maybe.”

  Fiona went to brew some black coffee using a Mr. Coffee machine. The bitter liquid made them all feel a little better.

  “Where were you at the time of the murder?” Wren asked.

  Aarna pierced them with a withering gaze. “We’re back to that, are we? I had no motive to want Garrett dead. He was good to me. He gave me a job.”

  “Humor me.”

  “I was at home with my parents if you must know.” She looked embarrassed. “I was begging them for money, okay? I owed Garrett a lot for that job, but I was sick of it. I’m not meant to do such menial work, you know? I have my own YouTube channel!” Fiona looked to Wren, confused. The angel had no idea what the woman was talking about. “My parents have money. The least they could do was give me some of it. After they said no and accused me of being spoiled, I stayed for dinner. They were having a rare evening when they weren’t fighting.” She shivered. “I hate it when they fight.”

  Wren believed her. For someone like Aarna admitting to spending the evening with her parents was social suicide.

  I wonder what she does on her YouTube channel? It’s probably something lame like opening boxes or something.

  Aarna was tapping on her cell phone, ignoring them already. Wren felt like smacking her across the face for being so ignorant. She still looked shaken, but not nearly as much as she had been.

  “So, what do you do on your YouTube channel?” Wren asked.

  Aarna grinned smugly. “I order stuff from Amazon and open the boxes and film them. My fans love it. One day I’m going to be more famous than PewDiePie.”

  Wren nodded, trying not to laugh. How predictable.

  And who the hell is PewDiePie?

  “Am I still under suspicion?” Aarna asked. “I’m not a murderer.”

  “Five minutes ago, you were in pieces,” Fiona stated.

  “There’s nothing I can do about people being murdered.” She put down her cell and stared Wren in the eye. “I see the way you’re looking at me, judging me. I’m not just a typical, stupid American whose hands are fixed to her cell phone. If I even think about Garrett being killed for too long I’m going to go mad. I can’t be like that again. I can’t be... the type of person who breaks down over everything. I don’t want to end up back at the point I was when my brother died. I was so depressed that I couldn’t even eat.” She walked into the kitchen and brought in a large Amazon box. “This is my therapy. It keeps me sane and people, for some weird reason, like to watch me doing it. It makes me happy.”

  Wren felt like the worst person in the world. She had judged Aarna too harshly, thinking her some flighty socialite. She had to make amends.

  “Perhaps I could appear in one of your videos?” Wren offered. “You could use my house.”

  Aarna smiled. “You have that big house on Grantchester Street, right? That place is wicked.”

  “We’ll set it up some time.” Wren paused and added, “I’m sorry for being a cow.”

  “You’re forgiven.”

  They left Aarna to it. When they got outside it was already going dark. Wren realized she’d been non-stop all day. She needed a break and something to eat. Garrett and Katie’s killer could wait until tomorrow. It wasn’t as if they were going anywhere.

  “Let’s go home and order take out,” Wren suggested.

  “Good idea,” said Fiona, excited. “I’d love to try Chinese food. It wasn’t really a thing back when I was alive.”

  “All the clues about you are slowly building up. One day I’ll piece it all together.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  Chapter 29

  Something nagged at Wren’s memory all night. She would sleep for a while, haunted by dreams of Katie floating in the pool, and then wake up. There had been something in Katie’s house that had passed her by that she was sure was an important clue, something that would unlock the mystery. What was it? Why couldn’t she remember?

  The two cats were sitting on the edge of her bed, staring at her, annoyed. There was no look more terrifying than that of a cat which had been rudely awoken in the middle of the night.

  “What do you two think?” she asked them.

  Gracie meowed. Casper was silent.

  “You want me to meditate?” she asked them. “You know I can’t do that. My brain is always too busy.” She laughed. “Fine. I’ll try it.”

  Ten minutes later she gave up. The cats’ breathing was annoying her. Meditation was for people who had far more patience.

  “Are you okay?” Fiona asked.

  She had flitted into her bedroom. Fiona was wearing red and white striped tartan pajamas. They looked cute on her.

  “I thought I had an epiphany, but I was wrong,” Wren admitted.

  “Have you tried meditating?” said Fiona.

  Wren rolled her eyes. “Go back to bed. I want to try and get some sleep.”

  “I thought you might be sad because of... well, you know.”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “It’s yours and Alex’s wedding anniversary today. I saw it on that hunky firefighters and their cats’ calendar you have in the kitchen.” Fiona blushed. “Mr. March really is quite a man, hmm?”

  The date had totally passed her by. She’d been so busy with the murders and her dad’s arrest. How could she forget? She normally spent her wedding anniversary sitting on the porch and feeling sorry for herself, drunk on apple cider and a stomach full of chocolate truffles. She usually spent the week leading up to the day in a state of either dread or deep depression. Did this mean she was finally over it?

  “What are you thinking?” Fiona asked.

  “I honestly forgot all about it.”

  “Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe you’re finally ready to move on.”
>
  “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”

  Then it hit her – the marriage certificates in Katie’s drawer. She’d only glossed over them really in her search for something more interesting, but she’d read the names of the people Katie had married on them.

  Katie said her first husband was boring, a little obsessive.

  She saw him on the night Jordan was conceived. She claimed she saw him leave, but what if he didn’t leave? What if he came back?

  Jordan’s troubling DNA results...

  The man in Katie’s novel, her first husband, with the flatulence problem...

  All the other little things which she’d observed but ignored rolled back into her head. They made a startling, but scary, picture.

  “I know who did it,” said Wren.

  Now all she had to do was exact some sort of plan. She didn’t want to end up as victim number three.

  Chapter 30

  “I never suspected you,” Wren admitted, keeping her distance. “Not once.”

  “I don’t understand,” they said.

  “You were never on my radar. You didn’t appear to have a personal connection to any of the victims, but I was wrong.”

  They walked out onto their front porch. Wren took a deep breath. This was going to be hard, but she had to do it.

  “Why are you looking at me like I’m a murderer?” they asked.

  “That’s because you are a murderer,” Wren stated. “You bashed Garrett over the head with his heavy tips jar and he fell and hit his head on the coffee machine. You threatened to have me killed if my father didn’t confess to killing Garrett. You drugged Katie and threw her in her own swimming pool to drown her and frame her instead, for what reason I don’t know. You put threatening graffiti on my door. You spied on me. You’re a monster.”

  “This is ridiculous,” said Cedric. “Why would I do any of this?”

  Wren was starting to feel more confident now. She had yet to rattle him, or even get an emotion out of him, but she wasn’t finished yet. Far from it.

  “How long have you known that you were Jordan’s father?” she asked.

  “I am not Jordan’s father,” Cedric stated.

  “You and Katie grew up together in the orphanage, right?” Wren shook her head. “No. You have a brother.”

  “Our parents died when Jackson and I were both fifteen. We were twins. He was fostered but I wasn’t because I was deemed to have issues.” He didn’t elaborate, and so Wren had to assume it meant he was a psycho back then, too. “I ended up in the orphanage with Katie. After I turned eighteen, just after Katie, my brother and I got an apartment together in Snowflake Bay.”

  Wren nodded. That made sense. Everyone knew about the famous lawyer Jackson Roper, Snowflake Bay’s golden boy. Cedric had soared so far under the radar she didn’t recognize the name when she agreed to out with him.

  “So, Katie married you so she could escape the orphanage and try and have a normal life.” Wren took a deep breath. It was time to needle a confession out of him. “But you’re just creepy and boring. She knew she’d made a mistake and so she dumped you.”

  Cedric bared his teeth. “She didn’t know what she had.”

  “Then one night, years later, you saw her in a nightclub. You seduced her and after a fumble in the bathroom she got pregnant with Jordan. She didn’t know who you were because everyone was wearing masks.”

  “That’s garbage.”

  “Jordan has the FAP gene, just like you.” Cedric appeared shocked. He obviously didn’t know this. “I looked it up online. FAP can lead to several illnesses, including colon cancer. You had colon cancer, which is why you wear a colostomy bag. You made the mistake of confiding in one of the drag queens at ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Fabulous’. This condition is quite rare. It didn’t take a genius to realize you’re Jordan’s father.”

  He sighed and put a hand to his stomach. There was a slight bulge there. He was touching his colostomy bag.

  He kept touching it during our date!

  “I have to wear this thing for the rest of my life,” he said sadly. “You have no idea what it’s like.”

  “My heart bleeds for you,” said Wren, though a part of her did feel for him. Nobody deserved cancer.

  “Jordan needs to get a colonoscopy,” said Cedric. “I don’t want him to have to suffer through this.”

  “So, you admit it. You’re his father.”

  He nodded. “I found out when...”

  “Let me. You heard Jordan and Garrett arguing while you were in the Metropolitan bathroom.”

  “The walls are thin in those back rooms.”

  “I still don’t get why you killed Garrett.” She quickly came up with a hypothesis. It made sense. “You went to talk to him and tell him you were Jordan’s father. He laughed it off. You told him about yourself and Katie in the club bathroom and he got angry.” Cedric flinched, his lips quivering. “He attacked you, and you decided to end his life right there and then to stop him from telling Katie what you did.”

  “Katie is still the love of my life.”

  For some reason that irked Wren. Why was he still pursuing her if he was still in love with Katie? Was she just some sort of poor second prize?

  “Then why did you kill her?” Wren asked. “If you’d let her be, then my father would’ve been charged with Garrett’s murder and you would’ve gotten away with it. Oh, and thank you for that. I assume you pretended to be Jackson and talked to him and threatened to have me killed if he didn’t confess.”

  “She wouldn’t love me!” Cedric raged, ignoring the theory about her father. It was like he didn’t even matter. It made her furious. “Even though her husband was dead, and I told her I was Jordan’s father and we could be a proper family together, she still wouldn’t love me! She was so selfish. I was the one she needed. I was the one she should love. Do you know she laughed at me? She said I was crazy and that she could never love a boring, deluded pervert like me.” He was crying now. Wren started to realize she’d bitten more than she could chew. Cedric really was raving. “She said she never loved me. She said she only married me to create a life for herself away from the orphanage. She used me! She said she never would’ve slept with me at the Venetian carnival night at the nightclub if she knew who I was. So, I decided to kill her. I popped some sleeping pills into her wine, waited for her to fall asleep, and I picked her up and threw her into the pool. It was easier than I imagined. She looked so peaceful.”

  Wren felt ill. “You murdered the woman you professed to love.”

  “I’ll always love her.” He smiled creepily and turned the full force of his gaze onto Wren. She cringed a little. “But I was starting to have feelings for you, too. Why do you think I warned you to stay away from investigating the murder? I didn’t want you to find out it was me. I wanted to play the long game, with dates and meetings, so you’d fall in love with me gradually. It was working, right?”

  “Not really. No. You disgust me.”

  “You know what I do to people who abuse me.”

  He pulled a gun out of his belt. He pointed it at her. Time seemed to slow to a trickle. She knew she could do this. Cedric wasn’t a fit man. She could take him. Her taekwondo training, though limited, was finally going to be useful at long last.

  “You know too much,” he said. “I have to kill you now.”

  “People know I’m here.”

  She felt her muscles tense for the fight to come. She itched to punch him.

  “Do they?” he asked.

  She threw her left fist out. He ducked.

  “Useless!” Cedric shouted.

  The gun inched closer. She could almost breathe down the length of its barrel.

  “What was that supposed to be?” Cedric demanded.

  She kicked him in the stomach and tried to grab the gun. He was about to smash her in the head with his weapon when she pulled back.

  This is doing no good!

  A shot fired out from across the street. She
riff Fisher and Keegan emerged from their hiding places behind a parked car.

  “I’ve recorded everything,” said Wren.

  “Then I’ve got nothing to lose,” spat Cedric.

  He fired the gun.

  Chapter 31

  “Hello Wren.”

  She was standing on a bridge overlooking a small river. Multicolored dolphins splashed about in the waters, playing, frolicking. She appeared to be in New York City, but instead of roads there were canals. It was stunning.

  “Where am I?” Wren asked. She shielded her eyes as she looked at the sun. “What happened?”

  Fiona smiled serenely. “You’re in Golden, a city in Heaven. This is where I live. It’s beautiful, right?”

  The events of her confrontation with Cedric came back to her like a lightning bolt. It almost made her fall over the side of the bridge.

  “He shot me!” Wren exclaimed. “Oh no! I’m dead!”

  “You’re not dead,” said Fiona, slightly amused. “The bullet grazed your left arm. It’s a good job Cedric didn’t go to a target practice.”

  “Why am I here if I’m not dead? Not that I’m complaining. This place really is stunning.”

  “After you got shot, I thought I was a failure and I requested from Juniper that I be transferred to someone else. She wouldn’t have it. She insisted I stick by you to the bitter end.”

  “My life is not that bad. Well, maybe it is.”

  An angel in a business suit walked by. He appeared to be a Neanderthal man. Wren couldn’t help but stare.

  “Juniper told me I could tell you who I really am,” said Fiona.

  Wren smiled. “Oh, I already know that – Great-Grandmother.”

  “I can’t say that I’m not surprised you figured it out.”

  “You’re my great-grandmother, on my father’s side. It was easy to work out really, mainly because of all the little clues you kept revealing matched up with stories I’d heard from Grandpa when I was little about the nurse who defied her family and went to England to help during the Second World War. You left behind a husband and a small baby son called Harold.”