Dead in a Flash (Volume 4) (A Family History Mystery) - Softcover

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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Dead in a Flash

one

“NOW YOU’VE GONE AND DONE it!” my business partner, Esme Sabatier, said, lifting a cucumber slice off one eye to glare at me. “You know better than to say such a thing.”

“All I said was I can’t believe how smoothly this job has gone,” I said. I’d meant to put more punch into the protest but my voice came out dreamlike and warbly. The spa attendant was wrapping me in warm, wet sheets and I was bonelessly content.

“And now you’ve jinxed us,” Esme said with an exaggerated sigh. “Never say a thing like that until the job is done and the check’s cleared. We’re a long way from that—we still have the scrapbooks to finish and that last interview this afternoon.”

Any other time, Esme’s warning would’ve set off my alarm bells. When Esme gets one of her vibes, it pays to listen. But at this particular moment, I wasn’t sure I could remember how to worry.

I’ve never seen myself as a spa kinda gal. Before today, I’d thought of spa denizens as wealthy, pampered women in need of rejuvenation after a particularly arduous shopping spree. I, Sophreena McClure, a self-employed thirty-something, am not pampered, nor am I wealthy, though I make a decent living from my genealogical services company. Plus, I have a little locker room phobia left over from encounters with mean girls in high school gym class. But when a client rewards you for a job well done by giving you a free pass for the full treatment at the town’s new luxury spa, you say, Thank you, ma’am, even if you suspect you’d be too self-conscious to redeem the offer.

Esme, a fifty-something who’d been impervious to mean girls, had no such qualms. She’d dragged me out of bed before daylight, startling me out of a deep sleep by throwing back the covers and tossing a pair of jeans at my head. She’d prodded me to get dressed and thrust a go-cup of coffee into my hand as she herded me out the door. She’d piloted her SUV through the streets of our little town of Morningside, North Carolina, in the rosy glow of dawn so we’d be first in line when Mystic Lake Spa opened for business.

Our first treatment had been a mud bath, and I was ready to throw in the towel, literally, right then and there. Esme and I are a comical-looking duo—even fully clothed. Esme is over six feet of latte-toned woman. She carries herself as if she’s royalty and doesn’t worry over a little extra cushioning here and there. I’m a very short, very white woman with ungovernable auburn hair and have both the looks and the well-earned reputation of a nerd. We stood side by side and dropped our towels to step into a huge tub of goopy mud. I caught a glimpse of the attendant trying to suppress a grin and I wanted to pack it in. If Esme hadn’t threatened me with all manner of dire consequences, I’d have bolted.

After the mud bath, we got full-body massages, which left me so loose-limbed I felt drunk. I found I cared much less about the attendant’s tittering after that. Then came a mani-pedi, then a facial, and now we were stretched out on adjacent tables wrapped like mummies in steaming hot sheets with more stuff slathered on our faces and cucumber slices on our eyes. Zen-like music played on the speakers and I felt as if my spirit might actually be disengaging from my body. I couldn’t remember when I’d ever felt this serene. But now Esme, with her work talk, was disturbing my aura or misaligning my chakras or something. It was making my muscles kink up into their usual pretzel shapes again.

“We’ve got to stay on our toes,” she said, though she didn’t sound like she could have gotten to a sitting position, much less to her toes. “If we deliver on this one, it could mean a lot of business coming our way.”

“Yes,” I said, “well, we’re working for a senator. We’ve already got feathers in our caps just by landing this job.”

“Mm-hmm,” Esme said. “Big old peacock feathers. All the more reason we’ve got to come through with the goods without any glitches.”

“You’re right. And granted, today’s interview may be a little touchy,” I allowed, “but it’s not as if we’ll be asking about anything that isn’t already public record. It’ll be fine.”

Snagging this job really had been a coup. It had been a different twist from the normal family history searches that are our bread and butter. In this instance we’d been not only tracing family history, but documenting a long public service career as well. Along with the heritage scrapbooks we’d designed, we did separate books that highlighted Senator Stanton Sawyer’s decades-long career as a senator from the great state of North Carolina. These were going to be displayed at a birthday shindig held in his honor here at the new hotel and spa on Saturday. The elegant luncheon, carefully planned down to the last painstaking detail by the senator’s family, would draw not only a who’s who of North Carolina bigwigs, but dignitaries from all over the country.

It had all gone surprisingly well considering we were dealing with a politician—a species not known for harmonious collaboration. Senator Sawyer, or Senator Stan as he was known to his admirers, was now in the ease of retirement. As he approached his eightieth birthday, he was in a retrospective mood and had been forthcoming, even about things he regarded as missteps in his career and foibles in his personal life. But today we were slated to talk about a family tragedy and both the senator and his sister, Lenora Morgan—the one who’d actually hired us—found it a difficult and sensitive subject and had put it off until the very end. Still, I didn’t expect any real problems. I’m a professional genealogist and I’ve had plenty of experience with delicate family matters.

“You know, Esme, I feel like sort of a slacker on this one,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Esme said, and I didn’t need to lift my own cucumber slice to know she was glaring at me again. “I’ve worked my tail off. My back forms the letter C from being hunkered over the worktable sorting photos and putting together those scrapbooks. I feel like one of the Village People.” She started flailing her arms and singing “Y.M.C.A.” while the attendant was trying to wrap her up. The patient attendant reminded her, in a voice ever so soothing, that she was supposed to be searching for serenity, not getting her ’80s groove on.

“I’m not saying we didn’t work hard,” I said. “But the senator’s family has been in Quinn County since roughly around the time the earth cooled. So much has been written about them over the generations, it seems there isn’t anything left to discover. We didn’t have to do much digging.”

“Uh-huh,” Esme said. “But you know there is such a thing as too much information. There was a ton of stuff to plow through and narrowing it down to the highlights was no easy task.”

I thought of the many boxes of Sawyer family archives stacked around our workroom. “You’re right,” I agreed. “The senator has lived a long and well-documented life, a charmed life, really. Look how many times he was re-elected.”

“That’s...