Death Dangles a Participle
Amelia Prentice Cozy Mystery Series
Book 2
E. E. Kennedy
Death Dangles a Participle
Copyright © 2013 by Ellen E. Kennedy.
Published by Sheaf House® a division of Sheaf House Publishers. Requests for information should be addressed to:
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, audio recording, or any other form whatsoever—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013933715
ISBN: 978-1-936438-25-9 (softcover)
Cover by Kelsey Spann and Marisa Jackson.
Dedicated to the memory of a sweet and talented young woman: Kelsey Spann, who designed this book’s cover.
Other books by E. E. Kennedy
Irregardless of Murder
Book 1 of the Miss Prentice Cozy Mystery Series
“The Applesauce War”
in the anthology The Farmer’s Bride, from Barbour Publishing
“Dangling participle: A participle with no clear grammatical relationship to the subject of the sentence.”
—American Heritage Book of English Usage
PROLOGUE
Christmas vacation was coming to an end, and the Rousseau brothers were determined to savor every second of freedom before the public school system once more took them prisoner.
“Two more days, man, that’s all we got left,” sixteen-year-old J.T. complained as they drove along the lakeshore road in the elderly Volkswagen beetle that they had lovingly painted a garish, glowing purple.
Dustin, the elder by eighteen months, agreed. “Yeah, so what do we do?”
It was a brilliant, sunny day, and each new turn in the road revealed a different sparkling view of a frozen Lake Champlain, but the brothers noticed none of this beauty as they chugged aimlessly along.
“We gotta do something, man,” J.T. said. “We gotta make a name for ourselves. Maybe get our picture in the paper.”
He spoke aloud of glory, but in his mind he envisioned a pair of twins, Crystal and Courtney, pink of cheek and sleek of limb in their identical ski pants. The brothers’ perpetual quest was to persuade the Gervais sisters to go on a double date.
But how? The Brothers Rousseau lacked the self-discipline for athletics and were not particularly studious. Their looks, while agreeably masculine, lacked the definition that would come with maturity. Their jobs, J.T. working part time at a service station and Dustin at a sporting goods store, barely covered the basic necessity of gasoline for the car and CDs for their battered boom box. To make matters worse, Dustin had just been laid off. They were now reduced to buying used CDs wherever they could find them. IPods were financially out of the question.
The one currency they had in abundance, however, was their utter, wonton recklessness. This they had spent eagerly and in public at every opportunity, taking ridiculous dares, usually involving height: climbing goalposts, water towers, and once last summer, a ranger fire tower. The resulting attention from the police had put a temporary hold on their adventures, but the fire inside them remained unquenched.
“We can’t climb anything. Dad’ll take away the car if we climb anything again,” Dustin reminded his brother. He gazed across the expanse of frozen lake to the Vermont shore. “That ice festival coming up in February? There’s a fishing contest. Dad said we could enter with him,” he proposed halfheartedly.
“Don’t be stupid. Girls don’t care about fish. Besides, if I’m going to take Crystal to that dance, I’m gonna have to ask her early. We gotta do something now.”
J.T. squinted at the windshield. The sun could be blinding when it reflected off the snowdrifts.
The Volkswagen skidded on an icy curve in the road, and Dustin struggled to return to the right-hand lane. “Stupid car! It’s too light to drive on this ice. No traction. Now if we only had a Hummer.”
With difficulty and an abrupt jolt, he navigated over an icy ridge. The door of the battered glove compartment flopped open.
“This thing is falling apart!” Dustin reached over and slammed it shut.
“Wait a minute!” J.T. grabbed his brother’s elbow.
“Cut it out!” Dustin, startled, accelerated and narrowly avoided sliding into a snow bank.
The glove compartment door bounced open again. With a curse, Dustin leaned over and slammed it shut once more.
“You’re gonna get us stuck out here!”
“No, I’m not. I’m gonna get us famous.” The wild light of bravado was once more in J.T.’s eye. He pointed to the lake. “How thick d’you think that ice is right now?”
Minutes later, Dustin had driven the Volkswagen down a path that led to the edge of the lake. Both boys climbed out and sheltered their eyes with gloved hands as they gazed at the level, white plain that stretched to the snow-covered Vermont shore. The Green Mountains were a blue shadow beyond. The thumping from their ever-present boom box on the floor of the passenger seat shook the little car and caused gut-wrenching bass thumps to run along the ground.
“I’m telling ya, man, if we make it across, we’ll be in the paper. Guaranteed! Maybe on TV too!”
“Yeah, if. I don’t know, J.T. It’s kind of dangerous.”
“I know!” J.T. took a flying leap into a nearby snowdrift. “It’ll be great!” He formed a hasty snowball and hit his brother squarely on the shoulder with it. “Don’t be a wuss!”
Dustin took no notice of the horseplay. His eyes were still on the lake. “How long do you think it’d take?”
Sensing victory, J.T. scrambled to his feet. He flung out his arm. “Look over there! You can see the other side. It can’t be more’n a mile. Two, tops. How long does it take you to drive two miles?”
Five minutes later, the VW had traveled one hundred yards across the ice in an eastwardly direction.
“Come on,” J.T. complained as he slid another CD into the boom box on the floor and turned up the volume. “We can go faster than this.”
“Who’s drivin’? Shut up, okay?” Dustin hunched over the steering wheel and squinted into the distance.
“Whatever.” J.T. bobbed his head to the beat of the music and beat a fingertip tattoo on the dashboard.
Another five minutes, and another hundred yards had passed beneath their wheels.
J.T. sighed and slumped in his seat. “This is boring. The speed you’re going, it’ll be night before we get there. I wanna see people’s faces when we pull up on the other side.”
He rolled down the window and stuck his head out. “Hey, wait a minute. What’s that? Some kind of tent?”
Reverting to his driver’s ed training, Dustin was tightly gripping the steering wheel at the ten and two position. He glanced to his right.
“Just somebody ice fishing.”
“Wonder who it is. Wait here a minute.” J.T. scrambled out of the slow-moving car and slammed the door.
Muttering curses, Dustin braked carefully and went after his brother. Sliding a little on the ice, he quickly overtook J.T. and grabbed the back of his jacket.
“Get back in the car!”
But J.T. was already at the threshold of the tent. He pulled aside the door flap and st
uck his head inside.
“There’s nobody here!” he called over his shoulder. “But they’re fishing, all right. There’s the hole. He pointed. “What’s that round thing?”
Dustin sighed and peered over his brother’s shoulder. “That’s called a tip-up. Keeps hold of your fishing line. That’s a Frabill, top of the line. When I worked at the store, we sold a lot of ’em. This tent is one of those NIB fishing huts. I bet they bought it at Shea’s. But where’s all the other stuff, like stools and ice chests? What kind of a guy goes ice fishing without food?”
J.T. shrugged. “Maybe they’re off somewhere, makin’ yellow snow.” He snorted at his own joke.
Dustin glanced back at the car that still throbbed with the hip-hop beat. He pulled at his brother’s coat again.
“Come on! Let’s get out of here.”
J.T. moved further inside. “Wonder if he’s caught anything.”
“Cut it out! Come on back to the car.” Dustin’s voice cracked with anxiety.
But his brother wasn’t hearing him. J.T. squatted next to the hole in the ice and pulled aside the round plastic disc that stoppered it.
“Look! The ice’s got to be more’n a foot thick,” he called.
“Better be, or we’re dead meat,” Dustin muttered, “frozen dead meat.”
“Look, over there, Dus, they at least brought some lunch.”
J.T. pointed to a metallic lunchbox resting on the ice off to one side. He abandoned his examination of the fishing gear and picked up the box.
“Hey, it’s heavy. Wonder what he’s got to eat.” He fiddled with the clasps.
Dustin’s voice combined brotherly sternness with anxiety. “Put that down, dummy! It’s not ours!”
A muffled shout interrupted him. Both boys leaned down slightly and looked through the tent’s clear plastic window.
“Uh oh!”
A figure in the distance, dressed in a white hooded parka, was walking resolutely toward them, then running.
The boys were well acquainted with irate authority. “He’s not happy. C’mon, let’s get out of here.” Dustin sprinted for the car.
For the first time that afternoon, J.T. took his brother’s advice. Alternately running and crawling across the ice, he threw himself aboard the VW and slammed the door at the same moment it careened in a turn and headed back to the New York shore.
“Where’re you goin’?” J.T. panted.
Dustin stared straight ahead. His hands gripped the steering wheel tightly.
“Back where we came from. This whole idea was dumb, dumb, dumb!”
With the hip-hop music still rattling the countryside in their wake, they traveled the short way back to the New York shore at a surprising speed, gunned up the hill to the road and sped on. In the course of their hurried travels, they narrowly avoided collision with a snowplow and a taxicab before finally pulling into the driveway of their father’s house in town.
With a deep sigh, Dustin turned the ignition off, and in the resulting silence turned to his brother. “What’s that?”
“Oh, no!” J.T. looked at the object on the floor of the car. “The lunchbox,” he said in a puzzled voice. “I guess I just put it under my arm like a football when I ran.”
He unfastened the latches and pulled open the top to reveal a neat row of CDs in their plastic cases. He whistled.
“No wonder it was so heavy!”
“You dummy! That’s somebody’s music collection. Now what’re we gonna do?” Dustin pulled off his watch cap and twisted it. He looked at his brother. “We gotta give it back, J.T.”
“We can’t. We don’t know who to give it back to. Unless you wanna go back out to the lake.”
“Okay, okay, you’re right. Um . . . I need time to think about this. If Dad finds out, we can kiss this car goodbye. He’s already hot about the insurance goin’ up after that last ticket. Put it in the trunk, inside your gym bag until I figure something out.”
The two boys emerged from the car slowly. J.T. obediently opened the VW’s front trunk while Dustin circled the car to eyeball the tire pressure.
“How do you suppose they were gonna listen to those CDs anyway?” J.T. mused. “There wasn’t any player.”
“Shut up,” Dustin ordered in a desperate whisper.
He was standing behind the car, running his hand over the small back window. With the other hand, he sketched the sign of the cross on his head and shoulders. Curious, J.T. stepped around the car and followed his brother’s gaze, then blessed himself too.
Both boys watched television. They both knew what a bullet hole looked like.
CHAPTER ONE
Once again, I dreamed of drowning, struggling in the dark and chilly waters of Lake Champlain, which abruptly changed to the swimming pool at the YMCA.
Then, all at once, I was in the classroom, clad only in a swimsuit. My first class of the day was due to arrive any moment. I needed to get home to get dressed, but Principal Berghauser, strangely oblivious to my dress-code infraction, was shaking his head.
The late bell rang reproachfully in my ear. I opened my eyes, blinked, and made a reflexive grab for the bedside telephone.
“Aren’t you two finished honeymooning yet?” someone demanded.
It took several foggy seconds for my brain to sort out that the voice on the other end belonged to my friend and former neighbor, Lily Burns.
“No,” I told her, switching ears as I struggled to disentangle my delicate peignoir sleeve from the telephone cord, “we have one whole week left. Surely you didn’t call at—” I squinted at the bedside clock“—one-seventeen in the morning to ask me that. How did you get this number, anyway?”
“Marie, who else? I had to tell a really huge whopper to pry it out of her.”
Marie LeBow, manager of Chez Prentice, our bed and breakfast back home in the Adirondacks, and the only living soul entrusted with our whereabouts, had been sworn to secrecy except in the case of dire emergency.
“Who is it?” mumbled my new husband from his side of the bed.
I covered the receiver and murmured, “The Widow Burns.” It was Gil’s humorous pet name for the glamorous Lily.
Gil groaned and rolled over, making a head sandwich with his pillows.
“Aren’t you getting tired of all that tropical sunshine by now?” Lily asked heartily. “It’s nice and brisk here. Wind chill, two below. As Gil says in the newspaper, ‘January: the way nature intended.’”
Memories of my nightmare were fading and being replaced by irritation. “Lily, if this isn’t an emergency on the scale of an earthquake, so help me, I’ll turn you in for burning those leaves in the street as I should have in October; I’ll tell—”
“No, you won’t. You never do. Amelia, I was your matron of honor. Doesn’t that count for anything?”
“Don’t whine. Just what is it you want?”
“It’s Alec.” Lily’s relationship with her hirsute, hymn-humming swain, Dr. Alec Alexander, was on-again, off-again. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I decided you’re the one to talk to him. He likes you.”
“I thought he was pretty fond of you too,” I said.
The last time I had seen them was at our wedding. Alec was kissing her under the mistletoe.
“Not anymore.”
“Oh, Lily, you didn’t dump him again!”
“If you must know, it was the other way around. We were at dinner at the Lion’s Roar tonight—”
“He took you there again? That’s three times since you started dating.” Alec’s courtship of Lily must really be setting him back.
“Four, but who’s counting? Anyway, all I said was that I might have another date to the ice festival and—”
“And do you?”
“What?”
“Have another date?”
“Of course not. But I have been kind of hoping that somebody else might ask me.”
“Lily, how could you?”
“I’m not married to that man.” Lily’s vo
ice was taking on a familiar petulant tone.
We’d known each other forever. I could picture her sitting at the kitchen table where she always chatted on the telephone. She’d slipped off her earrings and three-inch high heels she considered de rigueur for dressy occasions and was probably massaging her toes, the nails of which had been professionally painted Lily’s favorite shade, Passionate Plum.
“Lily, this is ridiculous, it’s the middle of the night.”
Gil rolled out of bed and staggered to the bathroom. If he’d been a student of mine, the expression he muttered would have earned him several years in detention hall.
“But you will call Alec for me, won’t you?”
I kneaded my forehead with my fingertips. “Why? What for?”
“To bring him to his senses, of course! He said, ‘I’m cuttin’ ye loose, Miss Lily.’ Used those very words. But he was miserable about it, I could tell. I need you to change his mind.”
Poor Alec. He’d been crazy about Lily. It must have taken a lot of courage to say that.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you want him back? I thought you said—”
“Amelia, I’m not made of stone. I’m not positive this thing with Alec can’t work. I know he likes me a lot. He just gave up on us too soon. So are you going to help me or not?”
“I’m not sure I should,” I said carefully.
“What are you talking about? Were you at the same wedding I was? Did you or did you not aim your bouquet at me? I thought you wanted us to get together.”
She had me there. Alec had been infatuated with Lily for months, and I’d found his devotion so touching that I’d taken every opportunity to promote the match. But there was a limit to everything, and this was it.
“Lily, you’re just about the oldest friend I have and I do care about you,” I said. “I know I should’ve said all this a long time ago, but I kept thinking things would get better. Your treatment of Alec’s been shocking. You’ve led him on and used him and made fun of him behind his back. That lie you told about seeing the Lake Champlain Monster was beneath contempt. It could’ve set his work back several years or seriously undermined his scientific credibility.”
Death Dangles a Participle (Miss Prentice Cozy Mystery Series) Page 1
