by Blair Merrin
TABLE OF CONTENTS
MARINATED MURDER
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
Marinated Murder
Book Four in the Bandit Hills Series
By
Blair Merrin
Copyright 2016 Summer Prescott Books
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MARINATED
MURDER
Book Four in the Bandit Hills Series
CHAPTER 1
“Mom, is all this really necessary?” I ask, somewhat irritably.
Mom doesn’t even look up at me; she’s too busy adjusting the angle of a shriveled monkey’s paw upon a stool in one corner of the shop. The setup around her looks like a fashion shoot; I’m talking three-point lighting, XLR camera on a tripod, a clean white linen sheet hung behind the stool as a backdrop—except that the models, in this case, are my merchandise.
“Of course it is, honey,” she says. “Presentation is everything.” She bites her lip, peers through the camera’s viewfinder, and snaps half a dozen pictures in rapid succession. “We don’t want people to think our wares are shabby and secondhand.”
“Our wares are shabby and secondhand. That’s kind of the point.”
This is my fault, if I’m being honest. My mother’s relationship with the internet used to be like teens and eight-tracks; each was aware of the other’s existence, and had a vague idea of what it was used for, but hadn’t the foggiest about how it worked.
Then I introduced Mom to eBay a little while back, and since then she’s been obsessed. Her caffeine-fueled bidding wars have become her favorite topic of conversation, and now she’s turned to advertising some of our more esoteric merchandise online in an effort to simultaneously advertise Miss Miscellanea, and fetch a pretty penny for some authentic Bandit Hills swag.
And I have to admit, so far it’s working. We’ve had a ton of new hits to our website in the past few weeks, and our last online auction, an eighteenth-century dueling pistol that supposedly killed thirteen men (including the owner) fetched three times what I had it marked as.
Just to be clear, Miss Miscellanea is not a person; it’s my shop, a secondhand store located on the corner of Fifth and Main in downtown Bandit Hills. Usually we sell gently-used clothing, small pieces of furniture, knick-knacks, home goods, and whatever else people either donate or bring in on consignment, but lately we’ve been leaning toward the more… unique.
Mom is my only employee, and she’s a darn good one at that; when she delves into something, she goes all-in. She’s the kind of person that gets in a pool by jumping off the diving board. Normally that’s a good thing and a rare trait, but recently she realized that the occult, weird stuff we occasionally carry, is a niche market and garners a lot of interest outside our little town, so she’s gone all Fritz Lang on me, snapping a thousand professional-looking photos of specific items and posting them to auction.
I shouldn’t complain; it’s been great for business, but she’s also not around as much to help me out with the minor stuff. When she’s not coaxing a monkey’s paw make love to the camera, she’s off to any and every garage sale, yard sale, and rummage sale in Bandit Hills proper, looking to score some arcane item to auction off. She’s taken to putting ads in the paper for anyone that is cleaning house and looking to toss away goods.
It’s only a matter of time before she starts going through garbage cans, I just know it.
The bell on the door chimes. Normally I would greet a customer with a smile and, “Welcome to Miss Miscellanea!” but instead I wince. A half-second later, a furry beige cannonball darts from behind the counter, zooming toward the door and letting out a barrage of high-pitched barks as it does.
“Yap! Yap-yap-yap! Yap-yap!”
“Gah!” cries the patron, even though all I can see of him are a pair of legs and a very large cardboard box.
“Kodiak! Heel!” I yell at my mom’s little Pomeranian. “Back! Get! Mom, do something!”
“Come here, sweetie,” Mom calls, and the little dog immediately stops barking and retreats to Mom. She strokes his fluffy head. “There’s Mommy’s angel. Oh, what a good boy.” The dog lies down beneath the tripod, eyeing up the intruder mistrustfully.
“Mom, you really need to take that thing to Xander.”
“Oh, there’s nothing wrong with my little Kodiak,” Mom coos. “Isn’t that right, snoogie-woogie?” She rubs the dog’s belly as it growls at the man.
“Sorry ‘bout that, Bill,” I say. The man sets the box down on the floor. He’s a burly fellow in dusty jeans and a gray t-shirt stained with dried sweat around the collar. His face is a bit red from hefting the box (and probably a little from the tiny dog assault).
“No worries, Cass,” he says. “Got some stuff here for you, donations.”
The box is so large it comes up to my waist. I lift a flap and peek inside. Holy crap, I think to myself. The first thing I see is a burnished brass candelabrum, and a manual shoe-shine machine, and the roller of an ancient typewriter. “Bill, what is all this stuff?”
“Some odds and ends from a job; the old Waverly place.”
“Oh? Are you fixing it up?” Bill is Bandit Hills’ go-to general contractor. The guy really knows his stuff; I hired him way back when to help me install the counters and lights in the shop.
“Just the opposite. Tearing it down.”
“Why?”
He shrugs. “Not sure I’m supposed to say.”
I raise an eyebrow, tasting juicy gossip on my tongue. “Oh, come on, Bill. We’re friends. You can tell me.”
He grins. “Yeah, I figure you and that boyfriend of yours will find out somehow anyway.” (What can I say? I have something of a reputation for getting into things.) “Maximoff bought it,” Bill tells me. “He’s tearing it down to build some kind of hotel.”
“Wow,” I say, wondering how many other people know about it. If I haven’t heard anything, it means it hasn’t been run through the Bandit Hills rumor mill yet. “Well, I gotta be honest, Bill, some of this stuff might be pretty expensive—”
Mom practically elbows me out of the way to peek into the box. “Ooh, lemme see.” She starts pulling items out one by one, turning each in her hands and inspecting it as if she’s a professional appraiser.
“As I was saying, Bill,” I eyeball Mom for effect, “Some of this stuff might be pretty expensive. I’d be happy to do a consignment deal—”
“No, no,” he waves his hand. “Maximoff was very clear; he said get rid of everything. I figured you could use this stuff more than a dumpster could. There was some old furniture left too, but it was so moth-eaten it wasn’t worth saving…”
“Oh, my word,” Mom whispers. “Cassie, take a look at this!” She pulls an item out of the box.
It’s a skull. A human skull.
CHAPTER 2
…Made entirely of bronze. But the skull’s size and shape is about exactly that of a full-grown human adult. Mom holds it with both hands, so I can tell it’s heavy.
“Oh, that,” Bill chuckles. “Yeah, that’s an odd one. Almost kept it myself, ‘cept that it’s kind of…”
“Creepy?” I offer. “Gross? Weird?”
“Perfect,” Mom says, and we both look at her sideways.
“Uh, sure.” Bill turns back to me. “Believe it or not, we found that in the basement. There was this little room, bricked off from the rest. There was barely anything in it; keepsakes, it looked like. They’re all in the box here. Ain’t that the darnedest thing?”
“Sure is,” I agree quietly. I’ve been around enough weird stuff to know that if a bronze replica of a human skull was found in a secret walled-off room in the basement of an abandoned house, I really don’t want it in my shop for long.
“Anyhow, I gotta be getting back,” Bill says. “Y’all have a good day… and mum’s the word on this hotel job, right?”
“You got it, Bill. Have a good one.” I’m sure I can keep my trap shut for a little while. I mean, it’s only a matter of time before others hear about it anyway—you can’t really keep the demolition of an old manor house under wraps for long. Besides, he gave me (mostly) neat stuff.
As soon as he’s gone, I turn to Mom. “Ma, I don’t want that thing around here.”
“Cassandra, do you know what we could get for this?”
“Uh… a part in Hamlet?” I venture, but she’s already setting the skull upon her photo-shoot stool, unceremoniously tossing the monkey’s paw on the counter. She sets the angle and starts snapping photo after photo, turning it on its side, snapping more, ad nauseum.
I can’t help but look at the thing’s black, hollow eyes. It’s like the Mona Lisa; it looks like those eyes (or, eye sockets) follow me as I move around the store. I shudder a little.
Look, I’m no stranger to the unusual. And not just because of my occupation, but because of where I live. If you’ve never heard of Bandit Hills, look it up; we’re like ground zero for paranormal activity. Other places have amusement parks; we have a haunted motel. Some towns claim famous musicians or actors grew up there; we’ve got Charlie, the former mayor that gives tourists directions to downtown (and also died sixty-some years ago). Oh, your town has a park? Our kids play in crop circles.
But we’re used to it. When you grow up around stuff like that, it just becomes a part of life. In fact, sometimes I take a vacation and visit other places and I’m weirded out that there’s not ghosts roaming the halls. I’ve been haunted three times in the past few months myself; at this point I’m ready to amend my sign to say “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Corporeal Existence, No Service.”
All that being said, I’m not exactly about to invite trouble, and trouble is what this skull looks like—if for no other reason than the virtue of it being a skull.
The door chimes again, and again Kodiak the Pomeranian Alarm System unleashes a torrent of squealing yips, but he settles quickly after a few sniffs when he realizes it’s Bonnie.
“Hey, Bonnie,” I greet her. “You’re late this morning.” Bonnie runs a ranch on the edge of Bandit Hills, several acres of sprawling land on which she boards horses, livestock, dogs, cats… pretty much anything that anyone brings her. She’s also my best customer, and usually comes in just as we open to scope out any new goods we got.
“Yeah, I was interviewing new ranch hands,” she tells me. “Got a couple promising ones, too.” Kodiak lets her scratch him twice under the chin before he retreats to his doggie bed behind the counter. Apparently when he destroys all of humanity, he might just let Bonnie live. “What have you got new today?”
I point to the huge box on the floor. “That stuff just came in. Have a look.” She digs through the box for a few moments, and wrinkles her nose.
“Looks like rich people stuff,” she says. Bonnie’s tastes are generally a little more… bucolic, one might say.
“There’s another box over here I haven’t yet gone through.” I heft a cardboard box up onto the counter for her to peruse. I likely would have had time to go through it already this morning, had Mom not been so involved in her newfound photography passion.
She sifts through that one for a while, the only other sound being the click-click-click of Mom’s camera, and then Bonnie asks, “What’s this?” She holds up a thin book. The cover is brown leather, old and cracked, and the pages look a bit yellow.
“Don’t know. A diary, maybe?”
Bonnie flips through it. “Looks like someone’s recipe book. It’s all handwritten. There’s no name though… Hey, some of these sound pretty good. How much you want for it?”
I shrug. An old handwritten book with a cracked cover? Chances are good that if I’d gotten to the box before Bonnie, I might have just thrown it out. “Take it, it’s yours,” I tell her. “Consider it a bonus for being my best customer.”
“Well, thanks, Cassie, I appreciate it.” She tucks the book in her back pocket, and at the same time, her eyes widen. She only just now appears to have noticed Mom in the back corner, doing her photo shoot thing. “What… is… that?”
“It’s a skull,” I say offhandedly, as if a bronze skull is a perfectly normal thing to have lying around.
Bonnie steps over to it gingerly, like Indiana Jones approaching the Ark of the Covenant. “May I…?” she asks, and before Mom can answer, she lifts the skull in her hands. “How much?”
“Oh, that’s not for sale—” Mom starts.
“Twenty bucks,” I tell her.
Mom gapes at me. “Cassandra!”
“It’s a deal.” Bonnie fishes in the pocket of her jeans and hands me a rumpled twenty. “This’ll be perfect for the mantle.”
I like Bonnie; she’s a nice woman and a good friend. But the fact that she wants to display that skull in her living room disturbs me a little.
“Great. You want a bag, or…?”
“Nope, this is fine, thanks. See you, ladies!” And Bonnie scurries out of the shop, seemingly before we change our minds.
When I turn back to Mom, she’s still standing there with her mouth open, as if frozen in shock. “Why… I can’t believe… you sold it… we could have made two hundred on that, easy!”
“I told you I didn’t want that thing in the shop. Gave me the willies.”
Mom sets her mouth in a tight little line in her face. “Fine. You’re the boss, right? I mean, what do I know, I’m just trying to help out…” She continues grumbling all the way into the back office. “Try to do somebody a favor, what’s it get you?” Eh. She’ll get over it.
CHAPTER 3
The next day at lunchtime I fi
nally get to see Dash again. It’s been three days since I’ve last seen him; his caseload has been so heavy lately. Poor guy’s been running himself ragged… which also means that a conversation is bound to crop up that I’ve been avoiding.
He’s already at Tank’s Diner when I get there, and I slide into the booth across from him. Tank’s is like Bandit Hills’ version of Cheers, or Tom’s; it’s not just a place to get food and drink, but a place to learn anything worth knowing around here. It’s also where the tourists like to stop for a bite and a local ghost story… if we had any tourists lately.
“Hey, stranger,” I say. “How are you?”
“Exhausted,” Dash answers, and he looks it. He dumps another teaspoon of sugar into a cup of tea. Dash is the only private investigator in Bandit Hills. Most of his cases are run-of-the-mill stuff, but every once in a while something really unusual comes along—like last month, when he discovered that an elderly housewife bludgeoned her husband to death with a shovel. (I may have been there, and I may have helped him solve it, but the state police were involved, so we couldn’t very well tell them the whole truth.) Dash’s name was in all the papers in association with solving the murder, and since then he’s been getting referrals left and right.
“I could really use an extra pair of hands,” he continues. “Like an assistant… or an apprentice…” He raises an eyebrow.
“I’ve been thinking about it, I really have,” I promise him. Last month, after we cracked the Case of the Bat-Poop Crazy Old Woman (who also happened to be the former owner of Kodiak, the Killer Pomeranian), Dash offered to sponsor me as a part-time apprentice PI. “It’s just that with Mom on her eBay kick, I’ve been manning the store solo; I don’t have a lot of free time right now.”
“I get it,” he says. “We’ll talk about it again some other time.”
“I missed you,” I tell him, putting my hand on his.
