Fatal Frost (Dewberry Farm Mysteries Book 2) Read online

  Praise for Karen MacInerney

  “Karen MacInerney writes with verve and vitality, and her Natalie Barnes is a Maine original. I’m ready to book a room at the Gray Whale Inn!”

  —Susan Wittig Albert, bestselling author of Nightshade and other China Bayles Herbal Mysteries

  “Deliciously clever plot. Juicy characters. Karen MacInerney has cooked up a winning recipe for murder. Don’t miss this mystery!”

  —Maggie Sefton, author of Knit One, Kill Two

  “Murder on the Rocks has just what’s needed for a cozy evening in front of the fire with a good mystery book—a plucky innkeeper who’s come from off island and a determined developer who wants her land. Set on a rocky island off the coast of Maine, you can hear the foghorns, see the circling seagulls, smell the wild beach roses, taste the wicked blueberry coffee cake and the killer cranberry scones (the recipes follow the story), and feel the satisfying shivers when the first body appears.”

  —Cynthia Riggs, author of the Martha’s Vineyard mystery series

  “A savory blend of New England charm, delightfully eccentric characters, humor, and mouth-watering recipes . . . all served with a side of murder.”

  —Candy Calvert, author of Dressed to Keel

  “MacInerney’s charming sixth offers beautiful scenery, an assortment of appended recipes, and one of her strongest mysteries to date.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Sure to please cozy readers.”

  —Library Journal

  “A new cozy author worth investigating.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “This book is an absolute gem.”

  —Suspense Magazine

  “I kept reaching for the next page, and the next, and the next . . .”

  —MaryJanice Davidson, New York Times bestselling author of the Undead series

  “If you are a fan of Kelley Armstrong, Cheyenne McCray, or Kim Harrison then you will definitely want to check out Karen MacInerney’s Howling at the Moon: Tales of an Urban Werewolf, it is to die for!”

  —CoffeeTimeRomance.com

  “Humorous and event-filled . . . a romantic triangle also adds spice and interest. Future adventures promise to be quite entertaining!”

  —Romantic Times

  “You’ll have the reading time of your life with talented author Karen MacInerney.”

  —ReaderToReader.com

  “A swift-paced, fun romp.”

  —Charlaine Harris, New York Times bestselling author

  “A laugh-out-loud, wacky and hysterical romp.”

  —Sue Ann Jaffarian, author of the Odelia Grey mysteries

  ALSO BY KAREN MACINERNEY

  The Gray Whale Inn Mysteries

  Murder on the Rocks

  Dead and Berried

  Murder Most Maine

  Berried to the Hilt

  Blueberry Blues: A Short Story

  Brush with Death

  Death Runs Adrift

  Pumpkin Pied: A Short Story

  Whale of a Crime (forthcoming)

  The Margie Peterson Mysteries

  Mother’s Day Out

  Mother Knows Best

  Tales of an Urban Werewolf

  Howling at the Moon

  On the Prowl

  Leader of the Pack

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 Karen MacInerney

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503940345

  ISBN-10: 1503940349

  Illustrated by Julia Green

  Back cover design by Megan Haggerty

  Dedicated to my amazing editors: JoVon Sotak, who gave me the time and support I needed (not to mention great suggestions), and Charlotte Herscher, whose terrific editorial eye and expert guidance helped me bring it all together. Thank you!

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Grandma Vogel’s Lebkuchen Bars

  Quinn’s VÁnoČka (Czech Christmas Bread)

  Bubba Allen’s Glühwein (Mulled Wine)

  Spiced Pear Jam

  Brown Sugar Fudge Balls

  Mary Jane’s Lavender Goat Milk Soap

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  When you move from the big city to the country, you don’t expect crime to follow you—but sometimes, you can be wrong.

  It was mid-December, and I was dreaming of being clamped into a milking machine by my mother when Chuck, my apricot rescue poodle, woke me up with a low, menacing growl. I sat up and squinted at the clock: two thirty in the morning.

  “What’s up, buddy?” I asked.

  Instead of settling down, he waddled down the steps from the bed and stood at the bedroom door, growling like a fluffy version of Cujo.

  Goose bumps rose on my arms. I listened, but didn’t hear anything. Still, I had a bad feeling. Chuck didn’t usually growl at nothing.

  I pulled on my robe and walked through the dark farmhouse behind Chuck, who led me to the back door. I could see why he was growling: there was a light down by the creek, right by my burgeoning peach orchard. I opened the door a crack, letting a cold winter breeze swirl into the kitchen. There was the sound of metal scraping against soil. Chuck’s growl intensified, and I closed the door, adrenaline pumping.

  Unlike a good number of my neighbors, I didn’t own a gun. Should I just let whomever it was be? On the other hand, I didn’t like the idea of someone messing around in my peach orchard . . . and I didn’t want someone letting my escape-artist cow, Blossom, free.

  Besides, my land was my livelihood.

  Chuck’s growling started to swell into barking, and I hushed him, my eyes on the light. It had stopped bobbing; now it seemed to be fixed in one spot.

  I could call the police, but Sheriff Rooster Kocurek and I weren’t exactly on what you’d call good terms; odds of him coming out were slim to none. I could wait until morning to see what the damage was—but as I heard the sound of metal hitting wood, I worried that might be too late for my peach trees. I could practically hear my friend Quinn in my head, shouting, “Lucy Resnick! Be sensible!”

  But “sensible” was never one of my favorite words. If it were, I never would have quit my investigative reporting job in Houston to move to Buttercup, Texas, and buy a farm.

/>   A farm that was currently being ravaged by some unknown intruder.

  I didn’t have a gun, but there was a hoe just outside the back door. Shooing Chuck away, I slipped through the door and slid into my rubber boots, then felt around until I located the hoe. I wasn’t going to announce my presence, but I was going to see if I could find out what was going on in my pasture.

  The chilly wind nipped at my bare knees as I padded across the yard to the gate. I unlatched it quietly, my eyes still on the light, which was moving again. My heart pounded in my chest as I stepped through the gate and closed it behind me. I was just going to find out what was up, I told myself. I wasn’t going to get involved.

  As I got closer, I could hear a beeping sound. I paused; a moment later, there was another scraping sound, and a thunk. After a moment, there was another one.

  Someone was digging down by the creek.

  On my property.

  I quickened my pace, feeling violated. In addition to my peach trees, there were dewberry vines down there and all kinds of vegetation that I didn’t want disturbed. Who had the nerve to dig up my creek bed?

  Sure enough, the light of a flashlight showed the shadowy outline of a person with a shovel. As I hurried toward the creek, there was a clinking sound, and the person with the shovel bent down to investigate. I was close now. I held the hoe in front of me and was steps away from confronting the intruder when my boot snagged on a tree root.

  I yelped and stumbled forward, dropping the hoe.

  Before I could get up, the light had snapped off, leaving me in darkness. Fear and anger flooded me as I fumbled for the handle of the hoe. There was a crashing sound somewhere to my left. “Hey!” I yelled. “You’re trespassing!”

  The crashing stopped for a moment as I desperately felt the ground for the hoe. My arm scraped against something sharp—probably a dewberry branch—and I muttered a curse.

  Chuck barked from the house, sounding distant and anxious. I scrabbled backward, still searching for the hoe.

  Something exploded out of the bushes in front of me, and the glare of a flashlight blinded me. My hand closed on the hoe and I raised it to shield my head, but I wasn’t fast enough. There was a searing pain in my skull, and everything went black.

  It was still dark when I woke up. Chuck was snuffling at my face, whining with worry.

  “How did you get out here?” I asked as I sat up, my head throbbing. The wind ripped over the pasture, slicing through my bathrobe. I was chilled to the bone.

  I didn’t bother with the hoe—whoever had hit me seemed to be long gone anyway—and stumbled back toward the house, shaking with cold.

  The screen door had a new hole in it where Chuck had burst through—yet another thing to add to my list of repairs—but despite the door being ajar, the kitchen felt relatively warm and cozy, thanks to the wood stove.

  I closed the door behind me and glanced at the clock: it was 4:00 a.m. I’d been out there for almost two hours. I stumbled to the bathroom, where I examined myself in the mirror. My long, slightly gray-streaked hair was a messy halo around my face, and there was a huge purple bump on my left temple. Very attractive. I swallowed two ibuprofen and considered getting ice, but decided I was already cold enough.

  “Great way to start the Christmas season,” I said to Chuck, who was sitting at my feet. Together we adjourned to the bedroom and I burrowed under the covers, trying to get warm, wondering who in the heck was digging on my land—and even more, who had hit me over the head.

  I felt as if I hadn’t slept at all when the alarm went off at six. I reluctantly left Chuck behind and crawled out of bed and into the kitchen to fix myself a pot of coffee.

  My head was still throbbing, but when I touched the bump, it didn’t seem to have gotten any bigger. As the coffee brewed, I pulled on my boots and headed out to milk Blossom. It was too dark to see what had happened down by the creek yet, but I planned to investigate as soon as it was light.

  The coffee was ready by the time I got back to the farmhouse kitchen with a few eggs and two buckets of milk. I poured the milk into mason jars and tucked them into the refrigerator, then poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down by the stove with Chuck at my feet—he had finally deigned to get up—to wait for the sun to rise.

  “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good,” my Grandma Vogel used to say when I visited her at Dewberry Farm as a young girl. I wondered what she would think of the blue norther that had blown in with a fury just two days ago, requiring me to cover all the cold-season crops and put two extra quilts on the bed. Even after I weighed down the row covers, the wind had torn several of them up, and I still wasn’t sure how many of my lettuce seedlings had frozen.

  It had blown in an intruder, too, I thought grimly. Who had been digging down by the creek? And why?

  I’d have to ask around at the Christmas Market tonight, I decided as I poured myself a second cup, doctoring it with a dollop of fresh cow’s milk and a spoonful of vanilla sugar. Somebody would know. In the meantime, I hoped they hadn’t done too much damage to my dewberry vines.

  When it was bright enough to see, I tramped out the back door again, leaving Chuck curled up in front of the stove in a red-and-white argyle sweater and grumbling about the cold weather. He attracted burrs like Velcro in the summer, so I had to keep him trimmed, but now that the weather had turned chilly, I was experimenting with letting his fur grow out a bit. Unfortunately, it just made him look more sausage-like. It didn’t help that his apricot fur was the color of a hot dog bun.

  “Wanna go?” I asked, and he just looked at me before putting his head back down on the rug. Evidently he felt he’d already done his duty for the day. Whoever had been out last night was long gone.

  As I traipsed out over the frost-rimed fields toward the creek, I felt my anger rising. Unfortunately my fears of the previous night were justified. Where my dewberry patch had thrived, there was now a field of holes, and several of the canes were pulled up or broken off. Worse yet, two of my young peach trees had been torn out by the roots, leaving gaping holes beneath them.

  I kicked the trunk of a cypress tree in frustration, then wished I hadn’t. I righted the peach trees the best I could, piling dirt on the roots, but they just fell over again. I’d have to come out and stake them down later. They probably wouldn’t survive, but I was going to try. And whoever had done this was going to pay for it.

  After leaning the hoe up against one of the saplings, I hurried back to the farmhouse and filled my mug with coffee again. The warm ceramic felt good against my icy hands. For breakfast, there was bread from the Blue Onion Tea Shop and Cafe, along with butter I’d churned myself and the spiced pear preserves I’d put up last month. And eggs, of course—not quite so many from the chickens now that it was winter, but enough for scrambled eggs a couple of times a week.

  My life in the small town of Buttercup was simple, and money was tight, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I just hoped I’d be able to make it through the year. I’d had to replace a water heater recently, and my truck had started making ominous clunking sounds. I’d drained my reserves getting the farm going, and even though I made a bit of extra income helping out at the Blue Onion cafe in town, I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to afford to fix it. And now I had two upended peach trees, a mess in the dewberry patch, and a broken screen door to add to my list. I pushed that uncomfortable thought aside and grabbed a couple of eggs from the basket in the refrigerator.

  I had just poured two whisked eggs into a hot skillet when the phone rang. It was Quinn, one of my closest friends and the proprietor of the Blue Onion cafe.

  “Hey, Lucy!” she said. “What are you up to this morning?”

  “Well, someone dug up the creek last night. Took out most of my dewberry patch and two peach trees. Hit me over the head when I went down to investigate.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  “I think so,” I said. “I have a goose egg, but I’m more worried
about the trees.”

  “I hope you can save them. Were they the big ones?”

  “No, I just put them in last year, but still . . .”

  “I get it. You’re not the only one that’s happened to recently.”

  “No?”

  “Somebody snipped the fence at the Kramers’ the other day and left the pasture looking like it was hit by meteors. The cows were all over the highway; it’s a miracle none of them got hit. Apparently the Bacas have had trouble, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Some idiot looking for treasure, probably,” she said. “Lots of old lore about buried gold around Buttercup. Of course, no one’s ever found any, but it doesn’t keep them from trying.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “Krystal’s uncle’s hunted on and off for years,” she said. “I guess it could be him. Speaking of Krystal, she didn’t show up for work again.”

  A cold breeze stirred in the kitchen, and I felt goose bumps on my arms. “Did you call her?” I asked.

  “Yes, but her phone went straight to voice mail.” She sighed. “Maybe she ran off and eloped with her mystery boyfriend.”

  “Maybe,” I said, stirring the eggs in the pan. Like me, Krystal Jenkins had moved to town from Houston about six months ago. “Or maybe we should swing by and check on her.”

  “I was thinking that myself.”

  “Do you have enough coverage at the cafe?”

  “Actually, I was hoping you could spare a few hours to help me out. I have to make about four hundred Christmas cakes by this weekend,” she told me. “I’ve got more orders than I know what to do with, and I still need to have some for the market.”

  “I’d love to, but I’m scheduled to pick up goats from Peter this morning. Maybe I can drop by after I get back.”

  “Are you going to get your head checked out?”

  “I’m going to see how it does for a day or two,” I said.

  “If you have any trouble at all, you get to a doctor immediately, okay?”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “Oh—I’ve got some other news, too,” she said. “And I don’t think you’ll like it.”

  I glanced out the window. I knew it wasn’t that Blossom had escaped the pasture and headed down to eat the ornaments off the Christmas tree in the town square; after all, I’d milked her in the barn only twenty minutes ago, and it took her at least an hour to make it to town.