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A St. Ives Book Club Mystery
§
Nadine Doolittle
Copyright 2019 Nadine Doolittle
Electronic Edition 2019
261 Lac Bernard Road
Alcove, Quebec
Canada J0X 1A0
http://www.nadinedoolittle.blogspot.com
ISBN 978-1-988003-63-4
All rights reserved.
This publication remains the copyrighted property
of the author and may not be redistributed for commercial
or non-commercial purposes.
Cover design by Canva/Nadine Doolittle
Cover photograph donwhite84/pixabay
Who killed Jenny Blake?
In the gentle hamlet of St. Ives, a killer roams free.
In 1975, seventeen-year-old Jenny Blake was found strangled in the ruins behind the abandoned St. Ives Abbey. Her murderer was never caught. Forty-four years later, an advertisement in the local newspaper draws seven people, including Avery Holmes, to the home of Elliot Marks with the purpose of forming a murder mystery book club.
Within minutes of the first meeting, Marks puts forward an intriguing proposal: Instead of reading about murder, why not try solving one? Beginning with who killed Jenny Blake?
Was it her ex-boyfriend, the brilliant but withdrawn Jesse Sutcliffe, who was now a homeless alcoholic? Or Duncan Carmichael, the attractive local politician who was dating Jenny at the time of the murder? What about Karen Haggerty, the bubbly school secretary, who Duncan dumped for Jenny in the summer of ‘75? Or was it Ida Greb, the town librarian who was privately glad that Jenny was dead. And then there was the eccentric Elliot Marks, the club founder, who had a connection to the dead girl that no one knew about.
For Avery Holmes who moved to St. Ives to write novels, keep a garden and live comfortably, poking into an old murder case is a risky proposition.
After all, waking a killer who thought he or she had gotten away with murder could lead to ... well ... murder.
Contents
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Who killed Jenny Blake?
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Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Epilogue
About the Author
GATINEAU HILLS MYSTERIES
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A St. Ives Book Club Mystery
Chapter One
AVERY HOLMES settled in the window seat of her new home, balancing a cup of tea in one hand and the local paper in the other. Clear September sunshine warmed her face, though the weather had turned at last and autumn was beginning to show itself. St. Ives Public School started back last week; boisterous students streamed past every morning. She didn’t mind the racket they made. It reminded her of the animals she used to care for—only these students weren’t goats, chickens and pigs. She didn’t have to rouse herself to feed and water them. For the first time in thirty years, Avery could take the morning to simply relax.
It’s not that she didn’t miss her husband, Thomas, or the hobby farm they had in Quebec, but it was definitely a novelty having nothing to do in the morning but sip a cup of tea, read the paper and muse over what should be done about the garden. Instead of pulling goats out of her flower bed, she would actually be planting flowers in the spring. Instead of wrangling with chickens for eggs, she would simply boil an egg. Instead of—
Avery sighed. It was no use. She missed Thomas horribly. She missed the menagerie of their farm—the goat, the pig, the flock of chickens. Even the cat had stayed behind. The new owners were happy to keep him. They were a young couple with three small children, eager to start an organic farm. They’d paid her asking price for the twenty-two acre farm with pond and lake access. The house wasn’t quite finished, even after thirty years, but Avery had come away with enough money to buy a small hundred-year-old house in St. Ives with a little left over to sustain her until one of her books sold.
That was one thing that hadn’t changed in thirty years. She was still a failed novelist.
She snapped open the paper. The Haldimand Herald covered the entire Northumberland County. The best way, she decided, to get to know a community was to read its paper.
It was filled with the usual municipal business, coming events, petty crime reports and local issues. The centre pages were consumed by an upcoming Fall Fair and Back to School coverage.
Overall, the content was mildly interesting. It was reassuring to see that she had landed in a peaceful place. Her friends had been horrified by her decision to leave rustic French Quebec to bury herself in an Anglo-Saxon hamlet on the shores of Lake Ontario. Her reasoning was simple. She wanted a quiet life but she didn’t want to spend her senior years beating back the wilderness to have it. She wanted to devote her energies to writing, not animal husbandry.
St. Ives was obviously a nice town. She turned the pages, suppressing a trifle note of boredom. Nothing much happened here. A very nice town.
Reaching the classified ads section, Avery took a moment to read each ad carefully. You could learn a lot about the economy of a place from reading the classifieds. The luxury day spa that was the pride of St. Ives was looking for housekeeping staff. That was interesting and also something to keep in mind if she ran out of money. The Haldimand Herald was advertising for an intern journalist. That’ll be hard to fill, she thought. Graduates won’t be interested in working for a small town paper. The grocery store (where Avery bought her eggs now instead of wading out in rubber boots to collect them from the coop) was looking for a cashier. One of the octogenarians on staff must’ve retired—or died. At the bottom of the Wanted column, an ad caught her eye.
St. Ives Murder Club
Murder Mystery Book Club seeks new members
First meeting: Thursday, 8 pm.
112 Kings Road, St. Ives.
Only serious readers need apply.
Avery sat up. That was definitely not boring. She circled the ad and noted the date on the calendar she had hanging on her fridge. A book club had possibilities.
As much as she enjoyed her new-found peace and quiet, too much of a good thing wasn’t a good thing. She should make some friends, or at the very least, acquaintances. She was only fifty-two and in good health, but she ought to have someone she could call in an emergency. Her friends were in Quebec and her nephew was attending Queen’s University in Kingston. Her older sister had always been undependable and was, at this very moment, travelling the country in an RV with a millionaire drop-out from the tech world. Addison had always managed to attract such men.
Avery made her mind up she would go. She would join this murder club. What a strange way to describe a book club, she thought, reading the ad again. She hoped they wouldn’t be expected to murder anyone.
✽✽✽
DENNIS AND Helen Potter sat in silence over a plate of eggs
, bacon, tomatoes and toast, and it wasn’t even Sunday. The breakfast was Helen’s attempt to inject a sense of celebration into their lives. With the last of their four children moved out of the house, they had every reason to celebrate. For the first time in thirty-five years, they were alone. And it wasn’t going well.
“What are you plans for the day, dear?” She avoided looking directly at him as he rarely looked at her and it got tiresome trying to catch his eye.
Dennis was pawing through the paper with his usual zeal to find trouble in St. Ives or in the neighbouring town of Casterbridge, where there were plenty of bureaucratic misdeeds to complain about.
“Hmm? I don’t know.”
What sixty-five-year-old retiree knows what he’s going to do? The whole point of retirement Helen reminded herself, was the freedom to have no plans. She had read up on the subject in anticipation of Dennis’s retirement from Via Rail. All the magazines advised against expecting much from a newly retired spouse. Helen had worked outside of the home for such a brief period before their children came along that retirement wasn’t an issue for her. Her retirement began the day they put their youngest on the train to Toronto where he would live and work, and only come home for statutory holidays. The other three had left the nest after graduating from university but Nelson, the baby, had taken the longest to launch.
Did Dennis have the vaguest clue of how much she’d been looking forward to this time with him?
“If you are finished with the Herald, I’d like to see the gardening page.”
He glanced up in surprise. “You don’t garden.”
“I’m thinking of taking it up,” she said severely.
The paper was spread out between them. Dennis was trying to read up upside down while he ate his eggs. Helen flicked the pages to the classifieds to annoy him, but more importantly, to look for a job. If she wasn’t going to have fun, she might as well earn money.
“What’s that?” her husband said, stabbing an ad at the bottom of the page.
Helen read aloud. “‘St. Ives Murder Club. Murder Mystery Book Club seeks new members. First meeting is Thursday, 8 pm. 112 Kings Road, St. Ives Hamlet. Only serious readers need apply.’ Bit pretentious—‘only serious readers’—it’s hardly Shakespeare they’re reading.”
“Shakespeare has plenty of murder. What’s the address? It sounds familiar.”
Helen’s eyes widened as they met her husband’s. “Oh heavens, it’s the old Abercrombie place. You know the one I mean, behind the overgrown cedar hedge.”
“No one lives there. I thought that place was in receivership or seized for unpaid taxes. There was a legal notice in the paper. The kids didn’t want it because the cost of repairs would be more than the house was worth. It was built a century ago ... the finest house in St. Ives.”
“Well, the kids are in their early seventies now. I imagine they have homes of their own.”
“Or are going into a home,” Dennis observed dryly without looking up.
“That too,” Helen agreed. “Either way, they’re too old to welcome the hassle of renovating a derelict mansion. I wonder who bought it.”
Dennis wiped his mouth on a napkin. “Let’s find out. Let’s go, you and me. We’ll join this mystery book club and get a look around. I’ve never been inside the Abercrombie place.”
“It says serious readers only. You haven’t cracked open a book in a decade.”
Her husband gave her a cheeky grin. “I’m thinking of taking it up.”
He really was attractive when he wanted to be, Helen thought.
✽✽✽
HECTOR MANDELA stood at the full-length mirror in the bedroom, contemplating the civilian shirt and slacks he had chosen to wear that day. Was it too late in the season to wear khakis? Should a man who had never played a round of golf in his life wear a golf shirt? Why did he look so ordinary?
And so old.
“Hector! Are you coming down? I have to leave in twenty minutes and I’d like to eat breakfast while it’s hot.”
His wife continued to complain, though not as loudly, about needing to cook every morning for a man who was quite capable of cooking for himself when she had so much on the go at the moment.
She did, it was true—Joyce Mandela was a force to be reckoned with. She didn’t take retirement from her government job as a signal to slow down. Heck no. Joyce Mandela had joined the St. Ives Little Theatre Company. Sandwiched between rehearsals were trips to St. Ives Day Spa with her girlfriends, and when things showed any sign of slowing down, Joyce organized shopping excursions to the States.
Hector had hoped when he retired from the Navy and left his home, the ocean and friends in Halifax to live in St. Ives, Ontario at his wife’s request, that said wife would actually spend some time with him.
“I do want to spend time with you, darling,” she said when he had brought it up. “It’s you who don’t want to do anything with me.”
“I don’t want to shop, that’s true.”
“Or go to museums or travel or attend lectures or act in plays or take up a hobby—what is it you do want to do, Hector?”
Good question. As the only black man in the hamlet of St. Ives and possibly all of Northumberland County, he felt isolated and out of his depth. In Halifax, he’d had the Navy to give him occupation, friends, community and identity, rising in rank until he reached Captain and then retiring the field in glory, riding off into the sunset.
The trouble was the sun sets in the west and Hector was an east coaster in his bones. He missed the ocean. He missed being on the deck of a ship. He missed faces that looked like his face. He missed the confidence he felt living in a city his family had lived in since the 1700s.
Joyce didn’t seem to miss anything.
Hector sat at the counter, perched on a high stool because that’s where his breakfast had been set out. His wife stood at the counter, sipping a cup of coffee and doing her best not to appear impatient. The eggs were scrambled because that took less time and not because he liked them that way. He didn’t.
“When will you be home?” he asked, idly flipping through the pages of the local paper.
“Rehearsal wraps up before lunch. We can take a drive after that if you like. I know you wanted to tour around and look up some old naval classmates. Or we could take a walk along the lake front. Lake Ontario is huge! It’ll be like seeing the ocean.”
“Maybe another time,” he said, feeling somewhat depressed by the prospect.
The paper held little interest for him. He folded it and pushed it to one side. Joyce pounced and snapped it open to the classifieds page.
“A yard sale, then. You love yard sales. Or a flea market. There must be something we can do.” She bent over the page and ran a polished fingernail down the columns.
His wife was always put together, glamorous in her way, but not matronly. Joyce had style. Hector was glad his wife was holding old age at bay even as he slid into the male abyss of khakis and golf shirts.
“Oh good lord,” she breathed, half-laughing. “Listen to this.”
She read the ad copy aloud.
Hector frowned. “I don’t understand. What’s a murder club? Do the members commit murder?”
“No, no, no—they just read about them! It’s a book club devoted to murder mysteries! Hector, you adore murder mysteries! You have to join.” She bustled to the calendar and circled the date with a red Sharpie. “Eight pm. That’s the same night I’m directing the new musical so that works out perfectly. You have to start socializing, Hector. You know you do.”
Joyce tenderly rubbed his greying hair that was not thinning yet, thank God.
“I’ve got to go. The girls are waiting for me. Will you be okay here by yourself for a few hours? I should be back before lunch and then I’m all yours. Good-bye, darling.”
He kissed her as he had done every day of his working life for thirty years. They loved each other still. They were happy in their way. But if he didn’t do something to keep his mind
occupied and to feel relevant again—all that might change.
Chapter Two
AVERY’S NEPHEW had his doubts and his doubts began to make her doubt.
“Why is it a bad idea? I thought a book club would be the perfect entry into getting to know a community. What’s wrong with it?”
“An ad in a newspaper just sounds so weird,” Dylan said. “You mean you found it in an actual paper? I didn’t think they still had those things.”
“They do in small towns. We had a local paper in my old town. That’s how people find out what’s going on in the community. That and bulletin boards.”
“I don’t like it,” he said firmly. “I wouldn’t trust an ad if there’s no social proof to back it up. Is the guy on social media? How are you going to know if he’s legit?”
Her nephew was on his cell phone, a device she hated since the reception was always terrible. He sounded like he was trapped in a tin can. Why anyone would choose a cell phone over a reliable, inexpensive landline was beyond her.
“The organizer took an ad out in the paper. That costs money, Dylan. I trust someone who plunks down money for an ad is more trustworthy than some fly-by-night on social media. Advertising is the way my generation got things done. It’s not weird. It’s actually quite sensible.”
Dylan Holmes was twenty-two and studying law at Queen’s. He was the love child of Addison Holmes and her paramour at that time whose name she refused to give. The truth was her sister didn’t know the name of Dylan’s father. Addison was thirty-two when she got pregnant and in the mood to have a baby, so she had one. Avery would’ve liked to have children but she was barren.
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