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Picture Them Dead (Volume 3) (A Family History Mystery) - Softcover

Buch 3 von 4: Family History Mysteries

Bonner, Brynn

 
9781476776811: Picture Them Dead (Volume 3) (A Family History Mystery)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1476776814 ISBN 13: 9781476776811
Verlag: Pocket Books, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

In this third cozy whodunit in the Family History Mystery series, a professional genealogist duo searches for the link between a death from long ago and a modern-day murder.

As a professional genealogist, I’ve seen enough skeletons come dancing out of closets to get a respectable conga line formed up. But they’ve always been metaphorical skeletons.

Until today.

When genealogists Sophreena McClure and Esme Sabatier are called on by Detective Jenny Jeffers to help figure out who the corpse in the backyard of her father’s house is, they reluctantly agree. Known for figuring out the unusual, Sophreena and Esme do their best to uncover the mystery behind the corpse, and the glass coffin he’s buried in. Word soon spreads about the bizarre burial site, leading the people of Morningside to “adopt” the corpse and begin leaving mementos in memoriam for him. But when the body of a young woman is found near the memorial, the duo has another task on their hands: to dig into the past of the house’s previous owners. Could the clues to a recent murder finally help this soul rest in peace?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Brynn Bonner grew up in Alabama and is a long-time resident of North Carolina. Both her literary fiction and mysteries reflect the landscapes and the genuine people of her southern heritage. Bonner currently pens the Family History Mystery series for Pocket Books. Writing as Ellen Harris, Bonner wrote six books for the Mysteries of Sparrow Island series published by Guidepost Books. Her short stories have been featured in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Now and Then, Crossroads, and other publications.

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Picture Them Dead

one

Thunderstruck.

That was my grandmother’s word for when a person is so stunned, it renders her slack-jawed and mute. I haven’t experienced this many times in my life, as I’m a decidedly sanguine person, but at the moment, I was definitely thunderstruck.

As a professional genealogist, I’ve seen enough skeletons come dancing out of family closets to get an impressive conga line forming. But they’ve all been metaphorical skeletons. Until today.

I stood on a berm of red dirt in our potential new client’s backyard, only a few miles from where I live in Morningside, North Carolina. I stared down into the hole the backhoe had ripped, and even though I’d been warned, I was shocked senseless. There was a skull grinning up at me, and while this was disconcerting enough, what really got me was the casket. It was made of glass in a milky green color and was broken in multiple places, the shards sticking out like spikes. The metal hinges were rusted and twisted and what was left of the lid had slid to the side. Tatters of rotted fabric sprouted from the pile of wreckage like desiccated seaweed. A jagged hole where the backhoe’s scooper had hit left a handy window for our macabre game of peekaboo with the grinning skull. The whole casket had settled wonky. It canted to one side as if the occupant had rolled over in his big sleep and taken the casket with him.

“Dear sweet Lord, have mercy,” my business partner, Esme Sabatier, whispered.

For the first time in weeks, she and I were in total agreement.

Esme’s been my cohort in our genealogy research business for several years, but more than that, she’s my housemate, my confidant, and my dearest friend. She’s my family. We’re great partners because we have complementary outlooks and skills. But the sprockets on gears are complementary, too, and if they don’t line up just right, there’s a lot of grinding. We’d been out of alignment lately.

This weird casket and its tenant were the most disturbing things Esme and I had witnessed today, but not the only jolt we’d had. We’d been snug in our beds this morning, minding our own business and trying to recover the sleep we’d lost over the past two weeks while on a job for a big Italian family in Maryland. We’d gotten in late last night, so exhausted we’d dumped our suitcases in the front hall and gone straight to bed.

A little after 8:00 a.m., which to my sleep-deprived brain was an ungodly hour, someone started mashing on our doorbell. I’d put my pillow over my head, but it didn’t let up. Defeated, I’d hauled out and trudged downstairs, muttering old Sicilian curses I’d recently learned at whoever was leaning on the bell. I threw the door open to find Jennifer Jeffers standing on our front porch.

Jennifer is the last person in the entire population of our little town who would pay a social call on Esme and me. She dislikes us—rather intensely—for some reason neither of us can fathom. True, we hadn’t met under the best of circumstances. Three years ago, one of our clients had been murdered, and for a brief time, Esme and I were deemed persons of interest since we’d been among the last to see her alive. Jennifer and her partner, Denny, had been the detectives on the case and had come to question us. We were quickly cleared, so I couldn’t see why Jennifer would still hold that incident against us. Denny certainly hadn’t. As soon as they’d eliminated us as suspects, Esme had become a person of immense interest to Denny.

But Jennifer is still so unfriendly toward us. We’ve tried being sweet to her, we’ve tried giving as good as we got from her, and we’ve tried analyzing every interaction with her to see if we could get any insight into the problem. Nothing had gotten us any closer to understanding what we’d done to offend her so much. These days, we did our best to ignore her.

Jennifer’s the youngest person ever to make detective in the police department, and quite the overachiever. Her partner, Denton Carlson, is Esme’s boyfriend, though that sounds like a silly term when you know them both. Esme is a beautiful ­Creole woman in her fifties and she’s substantial and statuesque—­over six feet tall in her stocking feet and fond of heels. Denny is the same age and is a Mack truck of a man. They are a formidable-looking pair.

I, on the other hand, am short and small, much like Jennifer Jeffers. When we’d first met, I’d had the brief idea we had some short-girl solidarity going, but she soon disabused me of that notion.

So, to see her standing on our front porch in off-duty clothes was a surprise. And what came out of her mouth after I gave her a puzzled hello was even more surprising.

“Hello, Sophreena. I hate to ask this, but I need your help. And Esme’s.”

I stood for a moment trying to process what she’d said, thinking I must still be sleeping and that this was a dream, or a nightmare ramping up.

“It’s not for me, it’s for my dad,” she said when I didn’t respond.

“And what is it we can do for you, or him, exactly?” I asked hesitantly.

“It’ll take some explaining,” Jenny said.

“Oh, okay,” I said, opening the door wider. “Come in. Would you like some coffee? I sure would.”

“No, thanks,” Jenny said, clearly uncomfortable.

As we went into the kitchen, I could hear Esme muttering as she descended from the mother-in-law suite on her side of the house.

“Who was that mashing that doorbell so early in the morning? Don’t they have any—” She halted mid-grumble at the bottom of the steps and reared back as if a sudden wind had pushed against her when she caught sight of Jenny. She looked to me for an explanation.

“Jenny needs our help,” I announced, raising my eyebrows as I turned to flip on the coffeemaker. “Or her father does. She was just getting ready to tell me about it.”

“Is that so,” Esme said, moving to the cupboard to get mugs and simultaneously giving me What the hell? eyes. “Well, let’s hear about it.”

“Have a seat,” I said, turning back to Jenny. She stood, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, looking like she’d rather be getting a root canal.

“That’s okay, this won’t take long,” she said. “I need to get back to my dad.”

We waited, enshrouded in what had to be the most awkward silence ever, until the coffeepot gurgled and Esme snatched it up and poured. “You sure you don’t want a cup?” I asked Jenny.

“Fine, if it will speed this up, I’ll take one,” Jenny said, taking the cup from Esme, who, with uncharacteristic ungraciousness, held it out only slightly, making Jenny come get it.

“Now, what’s this about?” Esme asked as she settled at the table, making a fuss of rearranging the cream pitcher and sugar bowl.

Jenny took a deep breath and let the words explode from her mouth. “My dad bought a new place a few months ago, just outside town—the old Harper place. It’s an old farmhouse and a five-acre plot of land. He’s doing a lot of work on the property, wants to put in a big vegetable garden and a bunch of other stuff. It’s this permaculture thing he’s into. This...

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Verlag
Pocket Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1476776814
ISBN 13 
9781476776811
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
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