Traveling Town Cozy Mystery Box Set

by Ami Diane

  The last letter loosely resembled an “A” but one of the legs grew long as the plane continued, flying low over the rooftops. A few heads ducked, and one woman screamed out.

  “Pisa?” Ella tilted her head, wondering if that would help. It didn’t “Do you think he was trying to spell pizza? Because I would vote for pizza to be mayor, no offense, Wink. Oh! Maybe he meant Pisa, as in Pisa, Italy with the leaning tower.” Why that would make more sense than pizza, she wasn’t sure.

  Stamping around on the walkway like a toddler, Flo cursed up a storm.

  The pink, smokey letters grew fat in the sky and began to dissipate. A peculiar smell permeated the air, the stench of mothballs and excrement, mixed with a pungent chemical.

  It made Ella’s eyes water and her nostril hairs curl up. She breathed through her mouth, plugging her nose.

  “Flo,” Will began, “you did empty out the fertilizer right?”

  “‘Course I did.” But uncertainty flashed behind her eyes.

  Ella coughed. “Holy skunks, Flo, that smells worse than death. And I know what death smells like.”

  Meanwhile, the Yellow Baron had begun another approach.

  “What’s that ol’ gas bag doing now?” Flo’s hands went to her hips.

  Jimmy and Will, who stood a head taller than the rest of them craned to get a better look.

  “He’s still spitting that stuff out.” Concern edged Will’s voice. A moment later, he hollered, “Everyone, inside!”

  Too late did the mass scramble for the church doors begin. Ella pressed against a large man in a kilt, but she may as well have been pushing against a brick wall for all the good it was doing.

  She wasn’t proud of it, but she may have also nudged a little girl forward. Not shoved, nudged. When she realized it was the little minion Sally, all guilt fled.

  A pink cloud barreled up the sidewalk like a sandstorm traveling at great speed.

  “Hold your breath!” she yelled. “Except you, Sally!”

  She closed her eyes and waited for the sweet release of death in the form of noxious fumes—or far more likely, a slight coughing spell.

  It hit her like a heavy mist. There was a whispering sound as whatever hellish pink poison was in the plane’s exhaust rained down around them. Moisture hit her skin, and if she’d thought the smell was bad before, it was nothing compared to the unearthly stench now filling her nostrils.

  Her head swam, and she swayed on her feet. Meanwhile, pink hellfire continued to pour from the sky. Something hit her shin hard.

  She swore loudly, peeling her eyes open to slits, just enough to make out the blurry shape of Satan’s spawn in the form of two blonde pigtails as she wound up for another crack at Ella’s shin.

  At that moment, enough people had fled into the church to free up the bottleneck. A strong hand, probably one of Sally’s parents, dragged the girl inside.

  Ella was next, and she felt Will beside her, jostling through the double entrance. Inside the refuge of the church, she moved out of the way and sucked in the fresh air. It tasted glorious.

  A chorus of coughs echoed all around the interior of the building like a choir with the black lung. The pink lung?

  A few feet away, Wink hacked, working on spitting up her entire esophagus by the sound of it. She spat fuchsia then wiped her mouth, glaring at her best friend. “What did you do, woman?”

  From head to toe, they were covered in pink like overfed flamingos. Ella coughed. “Hey, we could start a band called the ‘Pink Woman Group’ which I realize means nothing to you all, but trust me. It’s funny.”

  “You always say to trust you that something’s funny,” Will said, dusting off his fedora, “but I get the impression that if there was another person here from your era who understood that joke, they wouldn’t laugh, either.” His dimples deepened as he fought a grin before losing the battle to another bout of coughing.

  “Whatever, Pink Panther.” She glanced down at her own clothes to discover that she hadn’t fared any better than the rest of the crowd.

  Across the room at the peninsula of potluck dishes, Leif the Viking had taken advantage of the moment to begin the buffet. By the absence of bright color donning his fur, he’d forgone going outside.

  “Be right back.” Without a backward glance, Ella wove through the pink throng of poisoned townsfolk towards the tables. If anyone knew whether or not the pirate was living in the woods, it would be the Norseman.

  Leif held two plates, piled haphazardly with food, obviously not caring if any of it touched each other. Green beans piled on mashed potatoes. Gelatin on top of potato salad.

  In one fluid motion, she scooped up another of Rose’s cookies before stopping in front of the Viking. Slowly, her gaze traveled up a wall of muscles and fur until she was looking at his face.

  “Heill ok sæll,” she greeted him in Old Norse around a mouthful of sugar and cinnamon. At least, that’s what she hoped she’d said. Her Old Norse was getting better the more she spoke with the behemoth, but she was pretty sure she butchered his language every time.

  “Heil ok sæl,” he returned, using the conjugation of the greeting for addressing women.

  She shoved another large bite into her mouth before coughing, choking on the sugar as much as still hacking up pink fertilizer. She opened her mouth for another bite, thought better of it, and lowered her hand.

  This was going to be challenging. Not only because she wasn’t sure of the words for “pirate” or “privateer” in his language but also because most Vikings were veritable pirates themselves, by the modern definition anyway. She didn’t want to be indelicate. Also, he had a large ax strapped to his belt. So, there was that.

  “Hefur þú séð víkingr… sjómanninn,” she said in her hybrid Icelandic and Old Norse, asking if he’d seen a Viking before quickly amending the word to sailor.

  In Leif’s time, Vikings didn’t refer to themselves as such, but rather víkingr, the meaning kin to a warrior going on a sailing expedition. Perhaps, he would take note of someone more in his vein of work.

  “Hrunið brók,” she added.

  Judging by the confused expression on the Norseman’s face and the bristle of his bushy beard, she’d said something wrong. She mentally repeated the phrase and realized her mistake.

  “And by ‘crashed trousers’, I mean Hrunið bátr, a crashed boat.”

  After taking a deep breath to fortify her waning confidence, she proceeded to mangle a few phrases together, taking a snippet of Old Norse here, a pinch of Gaelic there, and a sprinkling of Norwegian as she painstakingly described the pirate’s getup she’d briefly glimpsed that day on the ship-turned-gallows. If the pirate had happened to wander the forest in a different outfit, this largely one-sided conversation was moot.

  The storm of confusion slowly cleared across Leif’s face. “Já.”

  Ella hissed air between her teeth, the Viking’s confirmation putting her out of her misery. “Oh thank God.” She’d been scraping the bottom of her linguistic barrel.

  Leif’s deep voice boomed out as he spoke with rapidity. Or maybe that was the normal pace, but it felt fast because of her tentative grasp of the language.

  She asked him to slow down a couple of times, and he did for a minute before speeding up again. Her face scrunched up as if that would somehow help, and she caught a few words here and there.

  From what she inferred, he had seen the pirate in the woods, but the man had been walking away into the distance. More frustrating for the Viking was that he’d spied someone else near his cabin on several occasions, two someones, as a matter of fact. A male and female. Every time they came by, they poked around his property with a shovel, and he always chased them off with his ax. Ella silently gave him kudos for not going full Viking on their butts.

  He never got their names—on account of chasing them, she suspected, and the whole language barrier issue—but based on his weedy description of the male, he wasn’t her victim.

  “Hvað gerðu þeir
?” she said in full Icelandic, asking what they’d been doing.

  “Grafa.”

  “Digging?” She tucked a wild curl behind her ear, thinking.

  If these were two random people, not in any way related to the pirate or buried treasure, then what other plausible explanation could there be for them digging in the forest on several occasions?

  Gathering worms? Truffle hunting? Archeologists?

  The other explanation was that these two nameless trespassers, having followed the pirate, were digging for buried treasure.

  Chapter 9

  ELLA VAULTED OVER the man currently laying linoleum in Grandma’s Kitchen and tried not to think of the large plumber’s crack she had just glimpsed. Despite the bright sun outside, there was a full moon inside.

  After checking on a young couple in the corner booth to be sure they didn’t want more “moo juice” with their breakfast, she topped off her own cup of coffee and slipped into the kitchen.

  “Just in time.” She reached for a freshly baked donut cooling on the island before Wink batted her hand away. “Ow. How much longer will Fix-it Felix and his twin be in there?”

  Wink’s hot pink bob shivered as she shook her head. “No idea, but if it’s not soon, there’s going to be two, very real dead bodies in town.”

  “Well, if nothing else, we can use them to store spare change.” At Wink’s blank look, she added, “You know because of their cracks showing….” Ella let the sentence die before clearing her throat. “Speaking of spare change, Glen paid up his tab. In pennies.”

  Wink sighed. Behind her, Horatio turned from the griddle, shaking the spatula that was fused to his hand. “That man is trouble. He is always complaining about his eggs.”

  His voice pinched, sounding nasally as he quoted the old patron. “‘They’re too runny. Am I supposed to drink this?’” The cook harrumphed before turning away, digging the spatula under a pancake with a little more force than necessary.

  Ignoring him, Ella brought the conversation back to a point Wink had made. “What did you mean by two ‘real dead bodies’?” Her hand slowly slid across the countertop, snaking towards a maple bar. “You don’t believe me about the hangman?”

  “I’ve always hated that game,” Wink muttered.

  “Games aside—wait, who doesn’t like Hangman?” Ella shook away the question. “You believe I saw a dead body, though, don’t you? Because, I’ll have you know, I’ve seen enough of them to know what they look like. It’s not like I confused his swollen face with a ripped sail.”

  She wasn’t sure why, but she expected a placating pat on the arm with a patronizing, “Sure, dear.”

  Instead, Wink set aside an egg she’d been about to crack into a mixing bowl, leveled Ella with a knowing look, and said, “Of course, I believe you. And whatever investigating you’re doing, I want in on it.”

  Ella stared for several breaths, unblinking. This is what it felt like to have friends who believed her no matter what, who had her back even when she saw something crazy and had nothing with which to substantiate that claim.

  “Since Chapman can’t really look into this without a dead body, I’ve been doing some digging. Nothing much.” She told Wink about the name sarcophagus on the shipwreck and what the Viking had said. “It’s possible I misinterpreted what Leif said, but based on his description, this other man wasn’t the pirate. He was also accompanied by a woman.”

  “And Leif didn’t know either of them?”

  Ella shrugged. “It’s Leif. I don’t think he even knows my name, and we’ve spoken half a dozen times.” She sniffed. “Should I be taking that personally? That seems like something I should be offended by.” She thought about it another moment. “Nah, who am I kidding? I don’t care.”

  After a moment, she continued, “You said there was that man following the privateer, trying to find the treasure… Alexander Something?”

  “Darren Alexander.”

  “Did he have a female accomplice.”

  “Not that I’ve ever seen.” Wink’s forehead scrunched up. “Unless his wife was with him, but I don’t think she supported his extracurricular activities when it came to the treasure. They made a big to-do in Stew’s once over the matter.”

  Her attention had returned to the mixing bowl, so Ella’s hand had resumed its slow stretch across the countertop towards the maple bar. “Has no one ever researched the name of the ship?”

  “I’m sure one of those treasure hunters always hounding the poor man has.”

  Wink turned her back as she bent into the industrial-sized refrigerator. Ella leaped forward, her fingers twisting around the maple bar.

  “If you so much as touch that donut, I’ll kidnap you and take you hang gliding again.”

  Ella dropped the maple bar like it was a scorching pan.

  Humming, Wink continued to rummage around in the depths of the fridge as if she hadn’t just threatened Ella with forcibly strapping her into a death glider several hundred feet in the air.

  “Do you mind if I pop over to the library on my lunch break and do a little research?”

  “Do what you want. It’s your break.”

  Ella paused a moment, sorting through her next words as she changed the subject. “Random question, but Will and I visited the professor the other day, and he mentioned a woman named Charlotte a couple of times. Was she his wife?”

  Turning, the smile lines around Wink’s eyes melted. “Ah, Charlotte, God rest her soul. Yes, she was his wife.”

  “What happened to her?”

  The diner owner’s mouth pressed into a thin line before she slowly replied, “Poor thing was hit by a drunk driver while walking to town. Awful, just awful. I’ll never forget hearing about it. I was standing at the lunch counter in there, serving up some mud, when Donnie comes running in and says someone up and died on Main Street.”

  Ella swallowed, studying her hands. What a tragic end to a life.

  The somber spell broke when the bell over the front door in the diner jingled. They stared at each other in a standoff.

  “I’m baking a pie,” Wink said by way of excuse.

  “And I’m busy.”

  “With what? You’re doing nothing but eating and getting in my hair.”

  Horatio piped up for the first time in a while. “Amen.”

  “I’m busy with this.” She pointed at her coffee. “It’s important.” When the diner owner’s nostrils flared, Ella snatched up her cup, careful not to spill, and quickly added, “I’m kidding, I’m kidding.”

  As she pushed off from the island, her hand shot out and grabbed the maple bar. She made it to the swinging door, two bites already taken out of the donut, before Wink yelled at her.

  The scent of old books and research sessions greeted Ella as she stepped into the Keystone Library. She inhaled the familiar scent as she wove through the aisles. Passing the reference desk, she opened her mouth to throw a greeting at Gabby only to discover the usual librarian replaced by her stuffy aunt.

  Ella had never gotten the woman’s name but thought she had as much personality as a block of wood. Actually, that wasn’t true. Wood had more character with its rings, bark, and striations.

  The woman’s eyebrows arched up in that expression that seemed to be requisite libraries over, no matter the location or era. She’d clearly had special training as her expression was particularly arched.

  Ella ignored her and wound to the reference section she knew so well. It wasn’t like she was doing anything untoward, but that didn’t stop the hair from raising on the back of her neck. When she glanced back the old bag was still watching her.

  Sighing, Ella put a bookshelf between them, hoping she wouldn’t need anything on the other side. The surrounding whisper of footsteps and pages turning told her she wasn’t alone in the building which brought her some comfort. At least Gabby’s aunt’s attention would be divided.

  She hurried, scanning the titles that crawled down the spines of the rows upon rows of books. The
nautical section wasn’t large, and in the end, she pulled a total of five books that seemed promising.

  Instead of her usual table in the dark corner, she dropped into a broken leather chair beneath one of the few precious windows in the back. Every few pages, she glanced at her watch, the minutes of her break rapidly whittling away. The books she’d selected were more historical in nature compared to the other titles she’d scanned, which seemed to focus on sailing.

  Flipping through the tomes, she struck out. Even a boat encyclopedia failed her.

  Ella dropped the last book on the stack, letting out a disgusted sigh. She checked her watch again. Ten minutes. With a grunt and popping of joints that should’ve come from someone three times her age, she rose.

  She returned the books to their proper homes and began to leave. As she passed the scientific periodical section, her steps stuttered. Her brain shifted gears to the other mystery she was looking into.

  Walking the row of books, she brushed her fingers along the spines of the periodicals. Since the town’s first jump had happened in 1951, nothing later than that year appeared, for obvious reasons.

  Back then, there were far fewer theoretical physicists than in her time—or at least, that’s how it seemed.

  What if…?

  She grabbed a few scientific publications at random. There wasn’t enough time to go through them now, but there would be later. With the pile of journals in hand, she cautiously slid up to the librarian, as if approaching a hungry lion.

  “Where’s Gabby?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “She’s a friend. I was just curious.” Ella hefted her stack on top of the desk and watched the woman’s limbs crawl like branches towards the periodicals as she took down numbers.

  “It’s her day off.” The old woman’s peeled back hair shifted with each quiver of her eyebrow as if her hair was somehow attached. “This is a good edition.”

  Ella leaned over, noting the woman referred to a Physical Review journal from the year 1935.