Murder in Tropical Breeze (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 1) Read online

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  For my husband, Dale, the love of my life, and for Karen (“Cousin Kiki”), with deep respect for the work she has done to save so many animals. Without her, this book would not have been possible.

  A big thanks to my “faithful readers,” Sandy and Lynda, who let me know when I was going off the rails.

  We salute everyone who has ever adopted an animal from a shelter or rescue. Remember, when you adopt, you actually save two lives: the one you take home, and the one you make room for.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Murder in Tropical Breeze

  Copyright © 2015 by Mary Bowers

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any way without the express written permission of the author.

  I’d love to hear from you! Contact me at [email protected]

  Cover designed by Revelle Design, Inc. www.RevelleDesign.com

  Chapter 1

  When I was a child, I would sometimes dream that I was flying. Not very often – once a year at most, and never after the age of 8 or 9. I can still remember those dreams, because they were so vivid. My hair would lash around my head and the wind would blast my ears, and I could brush the stars and planets with my fingertips as they came down from the sky and spun around me.

  Now that I’ve grown up, I almost never dream at all. But on that hot Monday night, as it passed into Tuesday morning, sometime last July, I was having a dream, and in that dream, I was flying.

  A voice kept telling me to wake me up. I frowned in my sleep and willed her to go away (it was a woman, and she sounded old). I didn’t want to wake up, maybe not ever again, because the dream was so cool and fast and fun, me flying low over a shallow green sea and everything that was swimming below looking up at me. I fought to stay under as long as I could. In that way we have of observing ourselves from outside, I remember deciding that the best thing to do was to ignore the old woman’s voice and go on soaring low and fast until she gave up and went away.

  “Taylor, wake up.”

  I shrugged her off and headed into the wind.

  “Taylor, wake up.”

  Relentless.

  I live alone, but I wasn’t afraid – I had known even in my dream that the voice wasn’t real. It was too much all-in-my-head.

  When she said it again, even louder, my magical ocean popped like a bubble and I found myself flat in my own bed, alone. I’d been dreaming so hard, I was sweating.

  “Okay, I’m awake,” I told the ceiling. “What do you want?”

  Nothing. Now that I was awake, the voice was gone. I felt a sense of terrible loss. The dream goddess had made a mistake and given a child’s dream to a 60-year old woman, and I’d probably never have another one like it. Just as I was drifting off again, my phone began to ring. I looked at my clock’s big red numbers, which read 4:34. Must be trouble at the animal shelter, I thought. Nobody else would call me before the crack of dawn.

  I didn’t even look at the Caller I.D., I was so sure it was Orphans of the Storm. I just hit the green button and said, “Hey, guys, what’s up?”

  “Sorry to have to wake you up, Taylor, but I knew you’d want to help.”

  My eyes popped fully open. “Jack? Is that you?” Jack Peterson was an officer with the Tropical Breeze Police Department, with a special assignment in animal control.

  “It’s me. Listen, we got a call earlier from a long-haul trucker. He pulled in at Spivey Freight – you know – Wally Spivey’s company? -- he pulled in last night and checked his load and found a litter of kittens in the trailer. Mama cat took off when she saw him. Well, you know Wally – he told the trucker to get the kittens out of the trailer and get rid of them. He wants to unload in the morning, and he wants them gone by then. He doesn’t care how. We’ve got his permission to go in, but we’ve had a busy night so we couldn’t get over there earlier. We’re on our way now.”

  I got out of bed and headed for my clothes closet. “I’ll be right over.”

  “Okay, we’ll meet you there.”

  I quickly got ready, grabbed my purse and was halfway out the door when something told me not to forget the chicken. “Oh, yeah,” I said to myself as if somebody had actually spoken. A handful of food can be a big help in luring a stray animal out of hiding. I opened a small can of cooked chicken and scooped it into a zip-up bag, shoved it into the cargo pocket of my capris and ran, saying “Thanks,” to nobody at all as I got out the door.

  I’d been working with the Tropical Breeze Police Department as a citizen volunteer, rescuing stray animals, since long before Jack Peterson had joined the force.

  Jack and his partner got to the depot first, and they had the door to the building open when he came up to my car as I got out of it.

  “They’re gone,” he said.

  “What? You mean Wally already got them?” Wally wouldn’t have been finding nice, comfy homes for them – he meant something else entirely by getting “rid of them.”

  “No. Mama cat must’ve come back some time during the night and moved them. The trucker said there were five or six of them, so I don’t think she could’ve taken them far.”

  The depot was depressing and damp, and a feeble dawn had begun to creep through the shadows inside the cavernous building. A stale clamminess rose from the concrete floor and pressed in around us with a smell that reminded me of the old days of commuting on underground trains back in Chicago. Must be a universal smell, I thought, since it was here in Tropical Breeze, Florida, too. That smell of serious men doing serious work in a gritty place for blue-collar wages. No place for a baby, no matter what the species.

  Noises echoed around the depot hollowly, and sounds were deceptive, but suddenly I stood at attention as a weak little “Mew,” came from somewhere inside the depot.

  “What is it?” Jack asked me.

  “I think I heard one of them. Listen.”

  “They’re over here,” a woman’s voice said from somewhere inside the building.

  “Oh, thank God,” I said to Jack, and I ran toward the sound of the voice.

  “Thank God for what?” he said as he ran along behind me.

  I turned to look through the shadows and did a double-take as I saw a figure standing between two trailers on my left.

  “In here,” she whispered, and then she disappeared between the looming shapes around her.

  “Omigod, is that --?” I looked at Jack, who was looking at me like I was possessed.

  “Taylor, what is going on with you?”

  But I was already halfway down the aisle, following the mysterious woman.

  She was
there, standing with her back to me, and I came up behind her and tried to look. “Behind those boxes,” she said. I was very close to her now, in fact I could clearly see her as she leaned over a pile of boxes stacked on a pallet about two feet from the wall, but her voice seemed far away.

  Suddenly she turned to look up at me.

  “Vesta!” I said, keeping my voice down so I wouldn’t scare the kittens. “What are you doing here?”

  She had her finger to her lips, shushing me, and I crouched down beside her on the floor. The space was narrow, and Jack had to keep behind me, asking me what in the world I was doing.

  “Vesta, you shouldn’t be here,” I whispered. “You should be at home in bed. Where’s Graeme? Does he know you’re here?”

  Suddenly I was more worried about Vesta than I was about the kittens. They were just beginning their lives, and babies are resilient, up to a point. But Vesta was around 80, fragile, and if the gossip was true, getting a little senile. I’d collect the kittens and get them back to the shelter, but first I was taking Vesta home to Cadbury House and letting her son, Graeme, know what I thought of him for letting her get out and wander the countryside before the sun was up. If she was getting confused, he needed to keep a better eye on her than that.

  “Just there,” she was saying, pointing behind the boxes. I could see that she was thrilled to have helped find the kittens. Her face had a strange glow, and her smile was ethereally beautiful. A draft I couldn’t feel lifted her wispy hair and riffled it.

  “I think I see them,” I said, moving up beside her and looking over the boxes. “Jack, I need your flashlight,” I said, reaching back without looking.

  “Here.” I felt the cold barrel of the heavy flashlight being put firmly into the palm of my hand.

  “Thanks.”

  They were there, huddled together, and so small and delicate they couldn’t be more than a couple of weeks old. They’d never survive if we didn’t get them to the shelter soon. I had a nice, warm, safe place for them back at Orphans of the Storm, and if we couldn’t find their mother, I had a lactating cat back at the shelter who would wean them. Sally’s only kitten had died soon after birth, and she was still looking for it, two days later. It would be a win-win, bringing kittens for her to nurse.

  “Come around and hold the flashlight while I get them,” I said to Jack.

  He did as I asked.

  In the end I had to get down on the floor, reach between two pallets of boxes and snake my arm around behind one to get the kittens, with Jack holding the flashlight and guiding me as I groped around for them.

  While Jack and I had been running through the depot, his partner, Andy Reilly, had come up behind us with the transport crate. I handed the first kitten to Jack, and Andy opened the crate’s door so he could gently place the kitten inside.

  I flopped back down and reached for another one.

  In the end we had five wiggling, murmuring little kittens. Their mother – the trucker had said it was a yellow tabby – was nowhere to be seen, and there was no hope of catching her tonight, even with a bag of chicken. We’d place a humane trap in the area, and if we could catch her, we’d have her neutered. Then, since no shelter in the area had a reserve for feral cats, we’d probably have to let her go.

  As I followed the men outside, I took another look around. I wasn’t optimistic, but I looked back into the depot anyway. I didn’t see mama cat, but I saw something else: a pair of green eyes looking down at me.

  I blinked, I shook my head, I tried to believe it was some kind of optical illusion. Then I stared at the spot without blinking until the figure of a cat formed itself around the eyes and became solid, a perfect black form against the murky gray around it. Heart pounding, I had to make myself breathe again. In fact I almost laughed: it was only a cat.

  High up, regarding me calmly from the top of one of the two trailers, was a large, perfectly posed black cat. It gazed at me with its luminous green eyes, and the contact between us for that thirty seconds or so brought me from a state of shock to one of curious blankness. The cat was an adult female – I don’t know how I knew that, but I did – and she was calm, almost disinterested. She considered me for as long as she cared to, then I felt a release and was able to blink.

  I turned to Andy Reilly, who was loading up the crate of kittens in my SUV. “Should we go after that one?” I asked. My words came out slurred.

  “What one?” he said, turning around. “Are you okay?”

  I pointed and turned back, but the cat was gone.

  I looked all around, trying to remember if I’d heard the thump of the cat jumping down or running away. No, nothing. I hadn’t heard anything. She was gone, as if she had never been there, and I began to doubt myself. For a split-second I considered finding a way to climb onto the trailer and look around the top of it, but a heavy fatigue came down over me like a blanket, and I suddenly felt so tired I could barely move.

  “Taylor?”

  “What? Oh. I thought I saw --”

  “What?”

  I shook my head. Now, for some reason, I wasn’t even sure I’d seen the black cat at all. “Nothing. There’s nothing there. Oh! And what about Vesta?”

  They stared at me, and Andy began to mutter something about the grapevine telegraph of a small town. “How did you hear so soon?” Jack said. “We only got her to the funeral home just before I called you about the kittens.”

  “The funeral home?”

  “Yeah. She died in her sleep last night. I can’t believe you’ve already heard. Did that dispatcher friend of yours send you a text?”

  Interpreting my frozen look as a tactful silence, he nodded and went on with the story, as long as I knew that much. “Her housekeeper – what’s her name? – Myrtle – Myrtle found her dead in her bed when she went to check on her.”

  I was speechless. I began to point back to the depot, where Vesta had been helping us find the kittens, but Jack was still rolling.

  “I know – you’re wondering what Myrtle was doing checking on Vesta in the middle of the night. We did too. She had a long song-and-dance about that – not being able to sleep, reading her Bible, going to the bathroom, getting a ‘feeling’ and going to check on Miss Vesta. Says she does that all the time when she can’t sleep, which is . . . all the time.”

  I was still staring at him in disbelief, and he mistook my expression. “Yeah, we thought about all that too, but Myrtle is one of those humble-servant types. We talked to Vesta’s son about her. He said it’s just like her to be creeping around the house at all hours of the night, pulling up the sheets and tucking them around Miss Vesta’s chin. Nothing suspicious there. Vesta was old, and she died in her sleep. May we all die quietly in our beds, right?”

  “Right,” I said mechanically, in half of my usual voice.

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  Jack suddenly looked more closely at me, so I pulled myself together. “I kind of hit the ground running today, I guess. I’m a little groggy, now that the adrenaline’s wearing off. Let’s go. I think those babies are hungry.”

  I had the feeling that if I shook my head, it would rattle. I didn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of two seasoned cops, so I decided to get to a quiet place and think it all over before I started talking about seeing Vesta – after she had died – in a truck depot, before dawn, where no Southern socialite, no matter how elderly and confused, would ever be.

  He grunted and handed me my car keys. Jack walked over and looked at me in the dead-white glow of the depot’s security lights. “You all right, Taylor?”

  “Yeah. Sure. Just tired,” I answered. “It’s going to be a long day, guys. I’ve got to get back to Orphans and introduce the kittens to their new momma, then get into my office and fill out all the paperwork.”

  “Us too,” Jack said. “Are you sure you’re okay to drive? You look kind of spooked.”

  For the first time I thought about how I must look. My easy-care, short, blond-going-gray hair was p
robably spiked out (not in a good way), and without eyeliner my green eyes tend to fade, especially when I’m tired.

  “I’m fine. I ran over here without putting on any make-up. I guess I need it more than I thought!” I laughed, demonstrating that that was a joke, ha ha, then I reached out to shake their hands. “Good night, Jack, Andy. And thanks. You guys are the best.”

  “Any time,” Jack said.

  I got into my vehicle and drove away.

  Now that I could think it all over, I went back to the voice that had called me out of my dream. It had been a woman. And she’d sounded old, like Vesta. Had it been Vesta? The thought invaded my mind and I quickly shooed it away. Just drive, I told myself. Don’t think. At least not until you’ve had a cup of coffee and managed to wake up.

  Chapter 2

  I pulled up in front of the shelter and parked. Once I’d turned the engine off, I could hear the kittens murmuring uneasily in the cargo space of my Escape.

  “Hold on, babies,” I said, trying to calm them with my voice. First I’d take care of them. Then I’d figure out what was wrong with me.

  I’d founded Orphans of the Storm some thirty years before, when I’d made the move from Chicago to Tropical Breeze after a series of disasters in my life.

  Both my parents had passed away by the time I was in my early twenties, and I rebounded into a bad marriage. We quickly got a divorce, and then I took a time out to think about what I really wanted out of life. I realized what I’d already known for a long time: I wanted to help animals. I’d been volunteering at shelters since I was just a kid, and I thought I knew enough to get one started, someplace where it was needed. I had inherited enough from my parents to be able to make a good start on my plans and keep going a while, so I got out of Chicago and settled in Tropical Breeze, Florida, a little slice of heaven with a beach, somewhere between St. Augustine and Palm Coast. Just outside the city limits, I found a nice little house with a two-acre vacant lot behind it. It was perfect for the shelter, and I threw myself into it and hoped for the best.