If Catfish Had Nine Lives (Country Cooking School Mystery)

Praise for the
Country Cooking School Mysteries

If Bread Could Rise to the Occasion

“Lovers of the supernatural will be intrigued by the ghosts that populate the book, while lovers of symmetry will be relieved to know that all of the plot strands cleverly connect in the end . . . The recipes included in the book attest to the appeal of country cooking, Missouri style.”

—
Mystery Scene

“Readers who love a little romance with their mysteries will not be disappointed . . . A wonderful addition to an intriguing and ghostly series.”

—
Debbie’s Book Bag

“Start with an interesting premise . . . Add a pinch of a wonderful setting . . . Season with murder and ghosts and a dash of romance. It won’t be long until there’s an appetizing aroma of mystery . . . [A] treat for cozy mystery lovers.”

—
Lesa’s Book Critiques

If Mashed Potatoes Could Dance

“Both mysteries were superb and I absolutely can’t wait to take a visit to Broken Rope again.”

—
Cozy Mystery Book Reviews

“[O]nce again, author Paige Shelton has cooked up a gem of a novel . . . Ghosts, a tiny old western town, seriously funny dialogue, and history and mystery make this a book you won’t want to miss.”

—MyShelf.com

If Fried Chicken Could Fly

“Take a puzzler of a mystery, season with a dashing ghost, add a pinch of romance, and you have a blue ribbon–winning recipe for a tasty read.”

—Jenn McKinlay,
New York Times
bestselling author of the Cupcake Bakery Mysteries

“A juicy mystery that’s deep-fried fun.”

—Riley Adams, author of the Memphis BBQ Mysteries

“I guarantee your spirits—pardon the pun—will be lifted . . . Paige Shelton has created a vivid setting [and] fun, friendly characters.”

—E. J. Copperman, author of
The Thrill of the Haunt

“[Paige Shelton is] a prevailing voice in the culinary cozy genre . . . [A] rib-tickling read with a sturdy family core filled with amusement, hijinks, and love . . . Shelton writes with a Hitchcock essence that readers once found missing . . . until now . . .
If Fried Chicken Could Fly
simply warms your spirit with delicious homespun goodness.”

—
Blogcritics

“
If Fried Chicken Could Fly
has terrific characters, including a wonderful ghost, and a perfect setting.”

—
Lesa’s Book Critiques

Berkley Prime Crime titles by Paige Shelton

Farmers’ Market Mysteries

FARM FRESH MURDER

FRUIT OF ALL EVIL

CROPS AND ROBBERS

A
KILLER MAIZE

MERRY M
ARKET MURDER

Country Cooking School Mysteries

IF FRI
ED CHICKEN COULD FLY

IF MASHED POTATOES
COULD DANCE

IF BREAD
COULD RISE TO THE O
CCASION

IF CATFISH H
AD NINE LIVES

Specials

RED H
OT DEADLY PEPPERS

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

penguin.com

A Penguin Random House Company

IF CATFISH HAD NINE LIVES

A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright © 2014 by Paige Shelton-Ferrel.

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.

BERKLEY ® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-63469-1

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / August 2014

Cover illustration by Phil Parks.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE: The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

For my husband and research partner, Charlie, who happily drove the car and brought along good music when I told him we needed to go out to the middle of Utah (which turned out to also be the middle of nowhere) to see a “real” Pony Express station, and that we needed to add a few hours to a road trip just so we could go to the Pony Express museum in St. Joseph. Your support and enthusiasm for my stories is beyond measure. Thank you.

“Believe it or not, I do know how to fish,” I said. “I’ve done this a time or two.”

“I do believe you, Isabelle, but why would you use a worm that isn’t real?” Jerome asked as he leaned back against the tree and folded his hands on his lap.

“Because I don’t like the feel of real worms. They’re slimy and alive and gross. These fake worms are wonderful inventions. And I believe we call them lures now. To lure the fish, you know.”

“Lures,” Jerome said with a disgusted sigh.

“Missing the good old days?” I said.

Jerome smiled his half smile. “Always. Not in the ways you might think, though.”

I was sure that Samuel Clemens himself would have been inspired to pen another great American novel if he saw Jerome and me in the woodsy setting.

I wore my oldest, most faded overalls and one of my mom’s straw hats. If the hat had seen better days, they were days before my time. My white T-shirt was new and clean, but surely Mr. Clemens would have forgiven that minor fault in my country look. I’d even had the urge to pick a long piece of grass and hold it between my teeth, but so far I’d resisted. Jerome was Jerome, dressed in his cowboy hat and cowboy-ish clothes—the clothes he was wearing when he was killed in 1918.

For the fishing excursion, I’d picked a spot in the woods that I was familiar with. It was close to town, very close, and still a secret to most of our visitors—the tourists who ventured to Broken Rope every summer, as well as the current group, who’d been more a surprise than a plan. The river was one of Missouri’s more narrow rivers and about a hundred feet back from the jail side of Broken Rope’s Main Street, the place where the buildings and businesses were set up to duplicate their original Old West incarnations. I’d fished this river a number of times, and I knew about the abundance of catfish it held. Well, it might not be so abundant at the moment, but it would replenish quickly, even after Broken Rope’s recent run on catfish fishing. It was only two days earlier that many of the town’s full-time residents, Gram and me included, had been standing side by side up and down the river with our lines in the water. We’d all had a successful outing.

As a town, we had—well, Jake had, and the rest of us had gone along—agreed that Broken Rope could feasibly host a cowboy poetry convention this year, since the cowboy poets’ normal campsite had been destroyed by fire the previous summer. For our contribution, Gram and I would be teaching a couple outdoor cooking classes—frying catfish over a campfire and Dutch oven techniques. Along with the frying, there’d also be large amounts of catfish eaten over the next four days. We’d had to stock coolers and freezers with enough fish to support a bunch of healthy, fueled-by-fresh-air appetites.

The convention was almost a day and a half old, and if Jerome and I listened hard, we could hear sounds from the skit currently being performed on Main Street—something about a pioneer wife’s disloyal ways that would, of course, result in a gun battle. We’d already heard a gunshot. I hadn’t been needed for this particular skit, so I’d decided to take a few hours of downtime just for me. Before Jerome arrived I was just going to go for a head-clearing drive. There were a couple reasons I felt I needed to get away from the activity. A little quiet time might help me refocus; the convention had conveniently been scheduled over the cooking school’s April spring break, and all the students had left town, so they didn’t need any immediate attention, but the timing also meant I’d gone from busy cooking school teacher to busy convention-planning assistant. My normal spring break day or two of recharging wasn’t going to happen this year. Fortunately, even though the cooking school year had started off rough, things had been sailing along smoothly, and busily, since January.

But with Jerome along, my biggest reason for ditching the long drive idea and escaping a hundred or so feet into the woods was that I wanted and needed a place other than my car or my house to talk to him without the possibility of being overheard or interrupted by something more than a fish tugging on the line.

He’d arrived the previous night. I awakened briefly and thought I smelled wood smoke, but he hadn’t appeared in my bedroom like he had the last time he’d visited. When I smelled the smoke and didn’t see the ghost attached to it, I attributed the scent to my slightly open window and someone’s fireplace. April in southern Missouri was somewhat unpredictable, weather-wise, but lately the nights had been comfortable enough to either open the windows a crack or light a fire, depending upon your temperature preference.

Instead of the awkward bedroom appearance of his previous visit, he’d waited until I left the house and then joined me in my old blue Nova—he’d simply appeared and said hello. He’d startled me, but at least I’d been fully dressed this time.

We’d sat in front of my house for a few minutes and caught up in the awkward way of catching up that we’d become accustomed to. If any of my neighbors had been watching, they would have wondered why I was sitting in my car talking to myself, but that sort of scene isn’t too strange anymore, considering cell phones’ hands-free features. After a few minutes of initial greetings, I called Jake and Gram to confirm that neither of them truly needed me until later in the day, changed into my favorite overalls, grabbed my tackle box, and drove us out to the woods.

“So, you think you’re here to save me?” I said, repeating a question I’d asked when we were in the Nova. The question had been one of many, and I didn’t think it had been answered yet to my satisfaction.

“I think so, Isabelle. I’m still fairly certain that’s why I come back now, to keep you safe from harm.”

“But you don’t know why I’m in danger?”

“No.”

It looked like that question, among others, might never be answered to my satisfaction.

“So maybe you’re just here for a visit? Maybe you were only meant to save me the last time or two you showed up. The rules do keep changing.”

Jerome thought a long minute and then said, “S’pose that’s possible.”

I smiled, but it wasn’t a totally happy smile. I appreciated his seeming raison d’être, of course. Even though there was a healthy-sized part of me that thought I was pretty good at saving myself, who wouldn’t want to be rescued by a handsome, long-dead cowboy? However, the ability to communicate with ghosts had made me somewhat less effective when it came to protecting myself from dangerous situations that included one or more of the spectral beings. I thought it commensurate that one should be able to save me every now and then.

The ghosts of Broken Rope’s past were now a solid part of my life. I’d never been much into history, but my fairly new, and apparently inherited from my gram, awareness of their existence had changed everything, including my interest in our Old West legends, as well as my personal definition of
safe
. The ghosts had certain uncanny and unpredictable abilities that had put me and people that I loved in harm’s way more than once. And, more than once, Jerome had saved me from a grim outcome.

Unfortunately, I also felt things for him that might be defined as unsavory and were most definitely strange. I liked him a lot; I’d talked myself out of being in “love” with him, but, truthfully, I wasn’t sure yet. I was one hundred percent sure that I loved my alive and still-breathing-oxygen boyfriend, Cliff (who didn’t know about and couldn’t communicate with the ghosts), so I’d decided that
that
love should trump my uncertainty about Jerome. It was a stupid thing to feel anyway—love for a ghost I’d only recently met. But, even though we hadn’t known each other long and even if he was technically not alive, no matter how hard I tried, I still couldn’t quite ignore those stupid and confusing emotions. I was working on it, though.

“But I don’t seem to be in much danger. Even the river’s not running too quickly. If I fell in, I could probably get out just fine. And I haven’t seen a ghost since the last time you were here, when Gent visited.”

Jerome squinted and thought a moment. “I surely don’t know, then.”

I pulled my attention away from the water and peered at him from under the brim of my hat. Though we were in shaded woods, a few stripes of sun were able to shoot through the high limbs and new spring leaves. Jerome was patterned; the parts of him in shade were more solid than the parts that were being hit by sunlight. In the dark—and when I was in the general vicinity—the ghosts became dimensional and touchable, though they didn’t feel like people as much as they just felt like something solid.

“You’re just going to hang around, then?” I said.

“I don’t have much choice,” Jerome said, but then he cleared his throat. “I mean, if I had a choice, Isabelle, of course I’d want to . . . what were the words you used? Hang around? I’d want to hang around with you, but my coming and going isn’t something I control, you know that.”

I smiled fully and tipped my straw hat back. It was a gesture I’d seen him do many times with his own hat. Suddenly, I felt a tug on the line.

“Oh, here we go.” I stood from the fallen tree trunk I’d been sitting on. I pulled the pole and wound the line.

“That was quick,” Jerome said as he stood and moved next to me.

“Much better than real worms,” I said, but I was startled by the strong pull from the sunken end of the line. “Hey!”

“Don’t lose him,” Jerome said as he crouched down and peered into the murky water.

The water was too dark and just slightly too deep to see the fish until I got it a little closer to the surface. But as I wound and pulled some more, it fought hard.

“It’s a big one,” I said.

Jerome looked up and tipped his hat back, just like I had done a moment before. “Once I caught a catfish that was so big it might have wrestled me back into the water.”

My forearms already felt twinges of pain up to my elbows.

“This one might be related to that one,” I said.

“I don’t know. I bet mine was bigger. I used a real worm.”

I laughed, but only for an instant. I had to pull and wind some more.

“I might have to let this one go,” I said. Those were words I’d never uttered before and never thought I would, but this creature was besting me quickly.

Jerome stood and put his hands on his hips.

“No, you can pull him in. Don’t give up yet.”

As much as I didn’t want to give in to any fish, this one was rapidly becoming not worth the effort.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Here, let me help,” Jerome said.

Neither of us took a moment to consider that it would be impossible for him to help. Though he’d been striped in shadow and slightly more opaque in parts, we weren’t surrounded by darkness, so he couldn’t be completely solid.

Nevertheless, he put his hands over mine and together we pulled, yanked, and wound the line.

An eternity of about half a minute later, the fish was at the surface.

“That is the biggest fish I’ve ever seen,” Jerome said. “Keep bringing him in.”

The Loch Ness Catfish Monster, as I’d suddenly decided to name him, fought, writhed, twisted, yanked back, and might have growled, if such a thing were possible.

“On three, one last big pull,” Jerome said. “One, two, three!”

The fish, which truly was one of the monsters of the river, I was sure, sprang up and into the air in front of us. Even as he was flying up, he was writhing and spitting. He was probably the biggest catfish I’d ever caught, but he wasn’t gigantic; I thought I should be able to handle him. He looked me in the eye right before he spit out the line, hook, and lure, and then splashed back into the river, drenching me from straw hat to cute tennis shoes. The force of the release sent me, Jerome, and the pole with the masticated fake worm to the ground.

An instant later, Jerome and I looked at each other and laughed.

It wasn’t long, though, before I sobered and the laughter transformed into something not funny at all.

“Wait, I felt your hands on mine,” I said.

“Oh?” Jerome held his hands up and looked at them.

“I’m not supposed to be able to feel you unless it’s really dark. It’s not really dark; it’s not dark at all.”

Jerome looked up toward the high treetops. “It’s not bright sunlight in here either.”

“But still.” I wanted to reach out and see if I could feel him. But I didn’t. I did not want the ever-changing rules with the ghosts to be changing again. I couldn’t keep up with all the edits, and accepting each new change took me time and contemplation.

Jerome looked at me, his eyebrows tight together. “Maybe I showed up to save you from the fish.”

It was an absurd statement, of course, but I didn’t laugh.

“No, you’re still here,” I said.

“That’s true.”

“Let me see,” I said as I tentatively reached for his hand again.

I’d placed my cell phone on another fallen tree trunk a little farther back from the river. It suddenly buzzed and vibrated and slid onto the ground. I pulled my hand back and got up and hurried to gather the phone.

“Gram?” I said. “What’s up?”

I listened to her words and tried to focus on their content, but she was saying some pretty unbelievable stuff.