by Jessa Archer
Who Shot the Serif?
A Hand Lettering Mystery
Jessa Archer
Archer Mysteries
Contents
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
About the Author
Who Shot the Serif?
When Jamie Lang finds one of her hand lettered quotes on the window of her shop, Flourish, with a hole shot through a serif, she knows someone's trying to drive her business into red ink. Jamie confronts Earleen Culp, the ruthless owner of the local stationery shop, in front of the most popular breakfast spot in the small town of Cedar Valley. Of course, Earleen professes shock and innocence, so when she’s found dead in front of Jamie's home the next morning, Jamie becomes the prime suspect.
Jamie's one cross-stroke short of acquittal, and even her best friend has her doubts. But Jamie's not the only one in town with a motive for wanting Earleen silenced for good. To clear her name, Jamie's going to need every last drop of ink in her quill.
With the hot police chief Ridge, and her makeup artist friend Nora on her side, she’s prepared to go out with a flourish if that's what it takes to catch the real murderer. She’s desperate to save her hand lettering business, but will her quest lead her right into a killer’s snare?
Chapter One
Cedar Valley, WA
Jamie Lang
Tuesday
Behind every successful person is a substantial amount of coffee isn't just one of my favorite quotes to hand letter. It's my mantra. To say that I'm grumpy before having my first cup in the morning is like saying birds fly. I need at least two large cups to feel almost human. And a third to cement the feeling. Anyone who's known me longer than five minutes knows this about me. If I'm not properly caffeinated, approach me at your own peril. In my shop, I even have a two-sided open/closed type sign I hand lettered—ready for business on one side and not sufficiently caffeinated for human contact on the other. I'm only half joking.
This particular morning, like usual, I grabbed my first cup from my home coffee bar moments after tumbling out of bed. Yes, I'm fully equipped with just about every type of coffee-brewing device known to man. I had a busy day ahead of me—subscription boxes to plan, an online video to prepare to shoot tomorrow, and an afternoon meeting with a bride.
I headed to Flourish, my beautiful, cozy hand lettering shop in the heart of sleepy Cedar Valley just outside Seattle. Flourish is my artistic heart and soul. If I were a shop, Flourish is what I'd look like. I fill it with items that inspire me and things I absolutely love. This world is dark enough. My goal is to bring sunshine into people's worlds one quote at a time, if that's what it takes. Making people happy is what my art and business are all about.
Fortunately, I was awake enough to make the short walk through town from home to work without looking anyone in the eye. A grunted "hi" was the most conversation I could manage pleasantly. Thoughts of a handcrafted hazelnut bianco latte motivated my slug of a body to keep moving.
The owner and head barista of Perk Me Up, my good friend Angel Russo, made the most delicious, and innovative, coffee beverages in King County. Given our area's obsession with coffee, and my amateur connoisseur status, that was high praise.
It was a beautiful early spring morning. The marine air, which is what we call fog around here, was slowly burning off. To the south, as the clouds lifted, Mount Rainier was making an appearance like a seductress slowly raising her skirts—one foothill at a time.
My friend Maggie Scott at the Cedar Valley Bakery next door to Flourish would be happy. A view of the mountain brought the breakfast crowd out from the city. And the breakfast crowd brought in the money.
The Cedar Valley Bakery has been a fixture in town for nearly a hundred years and is part bakery, part café known particularly for its breakfasts. On nice weekends, tourists and people from across Puget Sound wait hours to get in. They just love Maggie's giant breakfast scrambles. The bakery was crowded with locals as well as tourists as I walked by on the covered boardwalk. My little shop was sandwiched between a bakery/breakfast café and a coffee shop of perk-fection. Could life get any better?
Just past the bakery, I was so busy looking down to avoid accidental eye contact with anyone that I bumped into a stout, middle-aged woman wearing orthopedic shoes as she came toward me. Still avoiding eye contact, we did that stupid little dance where you each move the same direction as you try to get past each other. Her perfume was typical of a woman her age, overpowering, but still not enough to jolt me fully awake.
Just another tourist trying to get one of Maggie's delicious breakfasts. She'd better hurry before Maggie runs out of freshly baked cinnamon rolls.
The thought made my stomach growl. We mumbled our apologies as we finally sidestepped each other and went on our way. My clumsiness was typical of my state of not being fully awake, and one more confirmation I needed coffee.
I reached my shop and pulled my keys out of my handbag, pushing the strap sliding off back over my shoulder. I was intent on ignoring more people walking past me on their way to the bakery. Even that one little brush with humanity was too much. I kept my head down, concentrating on slipping inside.
Focusing on human avoidance was my lame explanation for missing the obvious as I first walked up—someone had taped a sign to my front-door window. As the door swung open, the poster finally caught my attention. I reached to tear it off, silently complaining about people posting flyers indiscriminately over other people's windows and logos. That was prime advertising space. Whose cat was missing now? Mrs. Miller's again? That cat really needed a bell, or a tracking chip.
But it wasn't a run-of-the-mill flyer. It was one of my hand lettered poster prints of the quote You make my heart smile. The entire quote was shaped, naturally, into a heart. It was one of my early, but solid, pieces of work. I'd sold thousands of these prints over the years and hundreds of hand lettered copies.
The poster shook in my hand. I wasn't sure whether fear, shock, or lack of caffeine was causing the shaking. Someone had used my print for target practice. Heart was pierced full of holes.
I ripped the poster from my window and slipped into Flourish.
Earleen Culp. My nemesis since my school days. This looked like her handiwork. You'd think she would have outgrown these childish pranks. But she was truly a Culp rat.
Earleen had hated me since I moved back to town for my senior year in high school and aced her out of being prom queen. There were only thirty people in our senior class and twenty of them were guys. Which meant every guy had to turn out for football and the girls took turns being dance queens and princesses and Miss Cedar Valley. Earleen had been homecoming queen junior year and figured her turn would come up again just in time to go out of high school in a blaze of glory as queen of the senior prom. Then I danced back into town to steal her crown. Adding insult to injury, I immediately caught the attention of the identical Calhoun twins—Ridgefield and Rutledge, better known as Ridge and Rut. She'd had her eye on them since birth, I think.
Ridge and I had been best friends until I moved from Cedar Valley to Seattle in eighth grade and we lost touch. When I came back to Cedar Valley, we resumed our friendship where we'd left off. And Rut? What can I say? He was hot and dangerous, where Ridge
was hot and a scant bit more responsible. Rut and I quickly became the "it" couple of Cedar Valley High, cementing my number one spot on Earleen's enemy list for life.
Earleen's family had owned the local stationery store in town for as long as anyone could remember. Earleen inherited it three years ago when her grandpa died, just shortly before my grandma died and left me her Northwest Craftsman bungalow in town.
It was Earleen's misfortune to have exceptionally bad taste in gift items, cards, and fine paper, and even less business sense. She'd been trying to run me out of town since I opened Flourish, using a bunch of childish tricks, including, but not limited to: trying to get the city to pull my business license; bribing my landlord to up the rent out of my reach; and spreading malicious rumors about me. On top of everything else, she blamed me for her failing stationery business.
I supposed she hadn't noticed how many greeting card stores had closed in recent years. Things were going in two diverse directions—either digital or handcrafted.
I'd like to take credit for being so fabulously business-savvy that I was able to run her generations-old establishment into extinction. But the real reason she was losing business was a sign of the times, not competition from me. She was going the way of the lamplighter, like it or not. And she had no idea how to stop it. Letting her wild nephews (really her cousin Dana's boys, but they called Earleen their aunt) use my art for target practice was definitely not beneath Earleen. Of course, she'd be only too happy to remind me how much she despised me by "kindly" returning my work.
I studied the poster, gently running my fingers over the holes. BB holes. The shots were clearly made with BBs. I'd been a pretty good shot with a BB gun myself at one point. Circumstantial maybe, but Earleen's two adolescent nephews got brand-new BB guns last Saturday. I remember clearly because I'd chased them out of my yard. I caught them hunting the friendly blue jay that liked to chatter at me from a large cedar on the edge of my property.
Those two boys would use anything for target practice. My neighbor had complained they'd shot up his No Solicitors sign and had promptly posted a No Trespassing sign in retaliation. Guess what he found full of BB holes the next morning?
I squinted at the holey poster. At least one of the boys was a pretty good shot. He'd shot the serif right off the T of heart. I wondered whether I should be worried for my friend the blue jay.
I tossed the pockmarked poster on the counter and sighed. Where had Earleen and the boys gotten it? It was too much to hope they'd bought it from me at some point. How dumb was Earleen to think I scared so easily? I needed coffee desperately now.
Flourish was connected to Perk Me Up on one side. When the businesses were open, customers could walk from one to the other. When one or the other was closed, we secured our spaces with locking roll-up walls. My wall was locked down. I unlocked it, anticipating the delicious smell of coffee as the barrier rolled away. But when I rolled up my wall, Angel's was still down and locked in place.
I grumbled to myself. Where was Angel? I needed her.
Some of my brain fog cleared. I remembered Angel warning me yesterday that she'd be closed today. She'd been taking a lot of days off recently. She was in Seattle at the funeral of yet another of her great aunts. She came from a large Italian family. It was impossible for an outsider to keep track of her family connections. It was midweek, so Angel decided to close shop and give her employees a day off.
If I wanted coffee (and it wasn't so much a want as a need), there was only one option—head to the bakery for a cup of barely tolerable cheap blend coffee. Faced with that or a caffeine headache, I'd take mediocre coffee. And a pastry to wash it down with. Maybe one of the bakery's famous Russian pretzels—a delightful frosted twist of flaky vanilla and chocolate pastry.
The Cedar Valley Bakery was the piece of sandwich bread on the other side of my shop from Perk Me Up. Unfortunately, Flourish and the bakery weren't connected. It was in a separate building. Which meant I had to go outside to get to it.
All I wanted was coffee, so I bypassed the line waiting for a table and headed to the pastry counter. I was intercepted by Ridge, who was now, inexplicably, Cedar Valley chief of police. He still had the same dark, dancing eyes full of mischief that he'd always had. The same full lips that curved easily into a wicked grin. And the same delightful sense of humor. It was just a lot harder to involve him in pranks these days.
Even though he was supposedly "just a friend," Ridge set my pulse on edge in a disturbingly pleasant, fluttery kind of way. He and I had a history of almost becoming romantic. Every time we teetered on the brink of becoming more, something interceded. Rut was the barrier between us now, and maybe forever. Neither of us had gotten over his death. He'd been Ridge's other half, and mine. Which left Ridge and me dancing around our attraction, unable to risk our friendship for what would be a complicated romantic entanglement. Ridge didn't want to live his life in his brother's shadow. And I was unable to convince him, or myself, that he wouldn't.
None of that stopped us from eyeing each other and flirting. And in my case, maybe even hoping. Ridge was wearing a suit, and a smile that sent shivers to my toes. He also had a leg up on me—he was holding a paper cup of coffee with the bakery logo, already on his way toward the perfect caffeinated state. The suit meant he must be heading to a meeting. The smile showed he was a brave man.
Ridge was the only person confident enough to confront me before my second cup of coffee. He also carried a gun and wore a badge, which helped.
"Slumming it today?" he said in his deep, rich, dark-brewed voice. He knew he was in dangerous territory and enjoying it. He'd always been a thrill-seeker.
I grumbled and pushed past him, too aware of his strong, muscled body.
"In a pleasant mood, as always, first thing in the morning," he joked, and made a point of taking a sip of his coffee. "Some things never change. I can count on you like the tides."
"Angel's closed," I muttered, which was obvious. Or Ridge wouldn't have been here. He was as much a coffee snob as I was. But by necessity, he stomached bad brew with better grace.
Linda Lewis was working behind the counter. She took one look at me and winced. "Oh, no. Angel's out again?" She looked panicky. "What is it this time? Another family funeral in the city? I swear, she has so many old relatives."
"Fewer every day," I said. "It's only a matter of time before they're all gone. It has to be." I was selfishly optimistic. I really hated it when Perk Me Up was closed.
Ridge's grin deepened.
"They're dying off like flies," Linda said. "I can never keep track of her huge family."
"No one can," I said.
"You want coffee, obviously." Linda glanced at the pot sitting on a burner. "To go?" Did she sound hopeful?
I nodded. "Biggest cup you've got." There was no point asking for a grande or a venti. Here coffee only came in small, medium, and as large as you can make it.
"Hang tight." As Linda turned to pour me a cup, Earleen walked into the bakery.
I smelled her distinctive perfume over the scent of baking bread and saw her reflected in the mirror on the wall behind the pastry counter. She spotted me and took a step toward me before seeing Ridge and hesitating. Oh, the conundrum—the lady or the tiger. In this case, the lady was the worse choice. Ridge was the tiger, and even though Earleen was dating Jack, my part-time clerk's ex, she wanted Ridge in her bed. She always had. She'd drop Jack in a heartbeat if Ridge ever paid her any attention. True to form, her hatred for me won out.
Ridge leaned insouciantly against the pastry counter in front of the chocolate éclairs, his suit straining against his broad shoulders. His eyes lit with interest. "This should be fun," he whispered to me.
I scowled at him. "Ingrate. I'm the only thing standing between you and her blathering flirting."
Earleen waved to me, an annoying wiggle using just the tips of her fingers. "Jamie, bad luck, isn't it? It's just not your day—Angel's out." She clucked her tongue. Her expression was a
nything but sympathetic. She was entrenched in her habit of being delighted with even my smallest setback.
"You can tell your nephews I'm not amused." I looked Earleen in the eye. "No matter how many of my posters you give them to shoot up, I won't be intimidated."
Earleen stared at me. "What are you talking about?"
"The poster shot full of holes that you taped to my door this morning."
Her eyes narrowed. "Still no clue. Someone must not be happy with your work. It would be a shame if a photo of it made it on Pinterest or Instagram. That's so not good for business." She flashed a flirty smile at Ridge. He deserved it.
"Stop the innocent act, Earleen. I'm way past implying. Let's just be honest—you're the only person I know who gets a kick out of making my business look bad."
She held her hands up. "I had nothing to do with it."
"Sure you didn't." I stared her down. "And pigs can suddenly fly."
Linda leaned out over the counter behind me, trying to get my attention as she waved a fresh cup of coffee at me. "Jamie. Jamie?"
People were stacking up at the pastry counter. And the small waiting area for the bakery café was crowded as more and more people arrived. They spilled into the bakery in front of the pastries, watching Earleen and me get into it.
I pointed a finger in Earleen's face, lack of coffee making me fierce. "Stay out of my business and stop trying to ruin me, Earleen. Or I will make you stop."
Earleen laughed in my face. "Go ahead, Jamie. Try. Are you going to kill me with one of your pithy hand lettered quotes?"
