The Legend of Sleepy Harlow

Dead Weight

I heard a voice cry out from somewhere over near the stage where Levi, Danny, and two other men had a brightly painted wooden coffin with the word Summer written on it in large yellow letters up on their shoulders.

“It’s heavy!” Danny called out. He was shorter than Levi and not nearly as broad, and even as I watched, he lost his grip. Since I’m even shorter than Danny, I wasn’t at all sure what I thought I was going to do, but I darted forward to lend a hand.

“The stupid thing’s just made of plywood!” one of the other men cried out, trying to adjust his stance when his feet slid. “There’s no way it should be this heavy.” He stepped forward, shifting his weight, then stepped back again just as I arrived on the scene, my hands out.

“Better not,” Levi called and, with a look, urged me to keep my distance. “We’re off balance. We’re going to—”

The coffin slipped off Danny’s shoulder, and after that, it was impossible for the others to hold on.

It hit the ground with more of a thump than plywood should make, and when one side of the coffin broke away and fell to the ground, it was easy to see why.

“Holy Toledo!” Like the rest of us, Danny saw the arm that flopped out of the casket, but unlike the rest of us, he apparently didn’t watch the police shows on TV and remember that things like bodies in fake coffins should be left undisturbed. He darted forward and flipped open the lid.

Noreen Turner looked up at us, dressed in her camouflage, eyes wide open, the left side of her skull smashed in.

It didn’t take a ghost getter to see that she was very, very dead . . .

Berkley Prime Crime titles by Kylie Logan

Button Box Mysteries

BUTTON HOLED

HOT BUTTON

PANIC BUTTON

BUTTONED UP

League of Literary Ladies Mysteries

MAYHEM
AT THE ORIENT EXPRE
SS

A TALE OF TWO BID
DIES

THE LEGEND OF S
LEEPY HARLOW

Chili Cook-off Mysteries

CHILI
CON CARNAGE

DEATH BY
DEVIL’S BREATH

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

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THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HARLOW

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

Copyright © 2014 by Connie Laux.

Excerpt from
Chili Con Carnage
by Kylie Logan copyright © 2013 by Connie Laux.

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eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-14326-5

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / October 2014

Cover art by Dan Craig.

Cover design by George Long.

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.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For Oscar, who couldn’t care less, and Ernie, who couldn’t care more.

Anybody who knows me knows that Halloween is my favorite day of the year. I love the swirling mixtures of orange and black and purple. I love the idea of dressing up in costumes and decorating the house with everything from lights that look like pumpkins to my purple Halloween tree complete with spooky ornaments. Even the chill in the air doesn’t bother me on Halloween, though it certainly will by the next day when I realize that the fine weather is over and winter is close at hand.

Writing about Halloween has made creating
The Legend of Sleepy Harlow
extra special. Like all books, it’s been a mixture of inspiration and perspiration, flights of imaginative fancy and what seemed like days and days of careful, plodding writing. As always, there are people to thank, including Sisters in Crime and all the special Sisters (and the Mister) I was lucky enough to spend time with in Charlotte; great writer and friend Shelley Costa, who helped me talk my way through any number of plot problems; email buddies Emilie Richards and Maureen Child, who all too often have to read about what’s happening in a book but are always willing to brainstorm; the great folks at Berkley Prime Crime; my agent; and, of course, my family.

  1  

I
wish I could say that the worst thing that happened that fall was Jerry Garcia peeing on Marianne Littlejohn’s manuscript.

Jerry Garcia? He’s the cat next door, the one whose bathroom habits have always been questionable and whose attention is perpetually trained on the potted flowers on my front porch.

Until that afternoon, that is.

That day, Jerry bypassed the flowers and went straight for the wicker couch on the porch, the one where, until the phone rang inside the B and B, I’d been reading Marianne’s manuscript because she wanted one more set of eyes to take a look before she sent it off to a small academic press that specializes in local history. Yeah, that was the couch where I’d left the pages neatly stacked and—this is vital to the telling of the story—completely dry and odor-free.

Jerry, see, had motive, means, and opportunity.

Jerry had mayhem in his kitty cat heart, and at the risk of sounding just the teeniest bit paranoid, I was pretty sure Jerry had it out for me, too.

It was the perfect storm of circumstance and timing, and the results were so predictable, I shouldn’t have walked back out onto the porch, taken one look at the puddle quickly soaking through Marianne’s tidy manuscript pages, and stood, pikestaffed, with my mouth hanging open.

Jerry, it should be pointed out, could not have cared less. In fact, I think he enjoyed watching my jaw flap in the breeze that blew from Lake Erie across the street. But then, Jerry’s that kind of cat. He leapt onto the porch railing, paused to give one paw a lick, and looked over his shoulder at me with what I would call disdain if I weren’t convinced it was more devious than that.

A second later, he bounded into the yard and disappeared, leaving me to watch in horror as the liquid disaster spread. From the manuscript to the purple and turquoise floral print cushions. From the cushions to the wicker couch. From the couch to the porch floor.

Oh yes, at the time, it did seem like the worst of all possible disasters.

But then, that was my first October on South Bass Island and I had yet to hear about the legend.

Or the ghost.

And there was no way I could have imagined the murder.

*   *   *

“Visit from Jerry?”

I didn’t realize Luella Zak had walked up the steps and onto the porch until I heard her behind me. I shrieked and spun around just in time to see her eye the smelly disaster.

“I was only gone two minutes,” I wailed. “I swear. It was only two minutes.”

“And Jerry managed to stop by.” Luella is captain of a fishing charter service that works out of Put-in-Bay, the one and only town on South Bass Island. She’s short, wiry, and as crusty an old thing (don’t tell her I said that about the old) as any sailor who plied any of the Great Lakes, but when she stepped nearer to have a look at the mess, she wrinkled her nose.

“I hope those papers were nothing you planned on keeping,” Luella said.

The reality of the situation dawned with all the subtlety of a dump truck bumpety-bumping over railroad tracks, and I shook out of my daze and darted to the couch. Before I even thought about what it would do to my green sweatshirt and my jeans, I scooped up the pile of yellow-stained pages and shook them out.

“It’s Marianne’s manuscript,” I groaned. “Marianne asked me to look for typos and—”

Luella didn’t say a word. In fact, she ducked into the house, and a minute later, she was back with a garbage bag in hand.

“We can’t.” Cat pee dripped off my hands and rained onto my sneakers, but still, I refused to relinquish the soggy manuscript. “We can’t throw it away. I promised Marianne—”

Careful to keep it from dripping on her Carhartt bib overalls, Luella snatched the bundle away from me and deposited it in the bag. “Marianne can reprint it.”

“But if I tell her to do that, I’ll have to explain—”

“So what, you’re going to take this back to her?” Luella hefted the garbage bag. “And you think she won’t notice the stains? Or the smell?”

My shoulders drooped. “I think I need to find a way to tell her I’m really, really sorry.”

“I think . . .” Luella thought about clapping a hand to my shoulder and I could tell when she changed her mind because she made a face and backed away. But then, I was standing downwind. “I hate to tell you this, Bea, but I think that you smell really bad.”

I didn’t doubt it for a minute, but really, there were more important things to consider. “Poor Marianne. All that work and all that paper and now she’ll need do it all over again. Printing out an entire book takes a lot of time.”

“Marianne wrote a book?” The instant I looked her way, Luella was contrite. “Oh, it’s not like I’m doubting how smart she is or anything. She’s a good librarian. But Marianne doesn’t exactly strike me as the type who’d have enough imagination to write a book.”

“It’s history. Island history. I didn’t get more than a couple pages into it, but I know it’s about some old-timer, Charles Harlow.”

“Sleepy!” Luella laughed. “Well, that explains it. Word is that Marianne’s family is distantly related. I’d bet a dime to a donut she devotes at least one chapter to trying to disprove that. Sleepy has quite a reputation around here, and it’s not exactly politically correct for the wife of the town magistrate to be related to an old-time gangster and bootlegger.”

“I dunno.” My shoulders rose and fell. “I mean about the gangster part. I never got that far. I’d just started reading and then the phone rang and then—”

“Jerry.” Luella shook her head. “Chandra really needs to do something about that cat.”

“I’ve been saying that for nearly a year.”

“We’ll talk to Chandra,” Luella promised. “Next Monday at book discussion group. And as far as Marianne, maybe if you just explain what Jerry did—”

I dreaded the thought. “She’s so proud of her book. You should have seen her when she brought the manuscript over here. She was just about bursting at the seams.” My stomach swooped. “She asked for one little favor and I messed up.”

“Not the end of the world. She’ll reprint, you’ll reread—”

“Inside the house.”

“Inside the house. And then—”

And then three black SUVs slowed in front of the house and, one by one, turned into my driveway.

“You’ve got guests coming in today?” Luella asked.

I did, a full house, and what with the manuscript disaster and fantasizing about the ingenious (and completely untraceable) demise of a certain feline neighbor, I’d forgotten all about them.

“Go!” Luella shooed me into the house. “You go change. And a quick shower wouldn’t hurt, either. I’ll let your guests in and get them settled and tell them you’ll be with them pronto.”

OK, so it wasn’t exactly pronto, but I did manage what I hoped was a less smelly transformation in record time. When I was done, curly, dark hair damp and in a clean pair of jeans and a yellow long-sleeved top (dang, I didn’t even make the Jerry Garcia and yellow connection until it was too late!), I lifted my chin, pasted a smile on my face, and strode into my parlor.

Straight into what looked like the staging for D-day.

Two women, two guys. Another . . . I glanced out the window and counted the men on my front porch. Another four out there. Each one of them carried at least two duffel bags or a suitcase or a camera of some sort, and each one of those was plastered with bumper sticker–variety labels. Black, emblazoned with icy blue letters:
EGG
.

“Welcome!” I tried for my best innkeeper smile and thanked whatever lucky stars had made it possible for Luella to take a few moments and swab down the front porch; through the window, I saw that the floral cushions were missing from the couch, and the water she’d splashed on the porch floor gleamed in the autumn afternoon sunshine. “I’m Bea, your hostess. You must be—”

“EGG.” The woman closest to where I stood in the doorway was at least a half dozen years older than my thirty-five, and taller than me by six inches. She was square-jawed, dark-haired, pear-shaped, and more than equipped for whatever situation might present itself. The pockets of her camouflage pants bulged, and the vest she wore over a black EGG T-shirt was one of those that fishermen sometimes sport. It had a dozen little pockets, and I saw batteries, flash drives, and other assorted gear peeking out of each one.

“Noreen Turner. I’m lead investigator for EGG, the Elkhart Ghost Getters.” When Noreen pumped my hand, it felt as if my fingers had been gripped by a vise. Her dark gaze stayed steady on mine in a firm—and sort of disquieting—way. “I’m the leader of this jolly little band, and—” She must have had first-class peripheral vision, because though I hadn’t even noticed the activity going on over in the direction of the fireplace, Noreen didn’t miss a thing.

She whirled toward a young, redheaded woman, and a muscle jumped at the base of her jaw.

“Thermal camera, full spectrum camera, Mel meter, IR light.” Noreen’s laser gaze flashed from the redhead to the cases of equipment she was busy stacking. “Really, Fiona? Really?”

Fiona’s cheeks shot through with color. She chewed her lower lip. “I thought—”

“Exactly your problem.” Noreen marched over, unstacked the equipment, and, fists on hips, gave it all a careful look. “Thermal camera on the bottom,” she said, setting that case down on the floor first. “Then the Mel meter on top of that.” The case with the thermal camera in it was larger than the one that contained the Mel meter, and she set the second case on top of the first, adjusting and readjusting so that the second case was exactly in the center. “Then full spectrum, then IR light.” She positioned those cases until they were just right, too, and, finished, she turned her full attention on Fiona, who held her breath and looked as if she was about to burst into tears. “You see what I’m getting at here, don’t you?”

Fiona didn’t answer fast enough, and Noreen lifted her chin and took a step toward her. “Don’t you? Top to bottom, kid. Top to bottom. IR on top, then full spectrum, then Mel, then—”

The oldest of the men in the room (I’d learn later that his name was Rick) was maybe fifty, a reed-thin guy with a receding hairline and a gold stud in his right earlobe. He stood closest to Fiona and he leaned in like he wanted to share a confidence, but since he didn’t lower his voice, whatever he had to say wasn’t much of a secret. “She wants it alphabetical,” he rasped. “She always has to have equipment stacked alphabetically.”

“So it’s easy to find what we need,” Noreen snapped.

“Whatever.” The man waved a hand and turned his back on us to look out the window.

“Well, it makes sense. And it’s the right way to do things. You can see that, can’t you?” She swiveled her gaze to me. “You’re a businesswoman. You can see the sense of it.”

Fortunately, I didn’t have a chance to answer. One of the men who’d been on the front porch came into the house pushing a two-wheeler with a big rectangular box on it. He parked the two-wheeler in the hallway before he joined us in the parlor. The man was about my age, with black, wavy hair and the kind of face generally reserved for statues of Greek gods. Dimpled chin, straight nose, high cheekbones. A picture flashed through my mind: Mediterranean island, whitewashed cottage, aquamarine water. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and—

“I didn’t ask you to bring that in.”

Noreen’s growl yanked me back to reality, and I found her glaring at Mr. Greek God. “We’re not ready for it,” she said, and pointed toward the box, which was maybe three feet high and another couple feet wide. Like the rest of the gear, it was plastered with EGG stickers. “I told you to leave it in the truck, Dimitri. That means . . . well, duh, I dunno. I guess it means you should have left it in the truck.”

“You said you wanted it in your room with you,” the man sucked in a breath and shot back. “And that means—”

“What it means is that you’re not listening. When I’m ready for it, that’s when I’ll tell you to bring it in.”

“In like, what, ten minutes?” Dimitri ran a hand through his mane of glorious hair. “I’ll tell you what, Noreen, you want it back in the truck, you take it back to the truck. I’m not moving it another inch. Not now, not ten minutes from now. I’m not stacking anything alphabetically, either, or measuring stuff to make sure it’s precisely two inches apart. You want to waste your time with your crazy organizing—”