A Splash of Murder (Pet Shop Cozy Mysteries Book 12) Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  A SPLASH OF MURDER

  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

  A Splash

  of

  Murder

  A Pet Shop Cozy Mystery

  Book Twelve

  By

  Susie Gayle

  Copyright 2017 Summer Prescott Books

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication nor any of the information herein may be quoted from, nor reproduced, in any form, including but not limited to: printing, scanning, photocopying or any other printed, digital, or audio formats, without prior express written consent of the copyright holder.

  **This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons, living or dead, places of business, or situations past or present, is completely unintentional.

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  A SPLASH OF

  MURDER

  A Pet Shop Cozy Mystery Book Twelve

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  It turns out there is such a thing as too much house.

  I know what you’re probably thinking: “Oh, Will, what terrible problems you have! Woe is you; your house is too big.” And to you I would reply that after everything I’ve seen and been through in just the last few months—let alone the past couple of years—I’ll gladly take this as my biggest problem.

  Just two weeks ago, my girlfriend Sarah and I moved into our new house at 1442 Sandbar Avenue. We went from a two-bedroom rented place on Saltwater Drive with a tiny kitchen to a three-bedroom, two-bath colonial-style home with a two-car garage and (gasp!) an actual dining room. And for two people, that’s a lot of house.

  Luckily we have roommates, albeit furry ones. Basket, our three-legged cat, has decided to take over the laundry room as his domain (and a hiding place from the dogs). Spark, our puggle, and Rowdy, our enigmatic terrier mix, usually can be found basking in the afternoon sun shining through the bay window, but they spend so much time in the expansive backyard that I’m thinking about installing a doggie-door so they can come and go as they please.

  Even after two weeks, we’re still in the process of unpacking and buying necessities. We’ve had to replace a lot of stuff because our previous home burnt down—actually, I should say it was burned down, as in arson, but that’s a whole other story.

  On top of all that, our time is somewhat limited because we have a pet shop to run, and Sarah serves on the Seaview Rock town council. But like I said, as far as problems go, this isn’t bad, on a whole.

  Most of the time.

  “Will, do you think you can mow the lawn this weekend?” Sarah asks me as she sweeps into the kitchen, back from a shopping trip to replace some much-needed kitchen utensils.

  “Again?” I groan. “I just mowed it last week.”

  “I know, but it rained for two days straight and the grass sprouted up quick. Also, we need to clear out the second garage bay so I can actually park in there.”

  Well, there goes my Saturday. “Anything else, dear?”

  She frowns, thinking. “You know what? I’ll just make you a list.”

  And there goes my whole weekend. Nobody told me that this was going to be so much work. I owned a home once before, years ago, with my ex-wife Karen, and I don’t recall it being half as much of a hassle.

  All the same, it feels good to have a place to call ours. And before anyone asks, no, we’re not married. Been there, done that, not in any rush to do it again. Besides, Sarah and I own the Pet Shop Stop together, we own a house together, and we own three pets together. As far as we’re concerned, we’re as domesticated as we need to be.

  “Hey, how about we do something fun tonight,” I suggest. “Dinner and a movie? I’ll let you pick the sappiest, most nauseatingly romantic movie out.”

  “That’s sweet, but I can’t. I have to meet with Mr. Casey and Holly to review the council’s new proposals. But… we’re meeting at the Runside, so you could tag along.”

  “Tag along. Sounds like fun,” I mutter. Since when am I the one tagging along?

  Sarah, Holly, and Mr. Casey make up Seaview Rock’s town council. In addition to that and owning an auto body shop called Sockets & Sprockets, Barton Casey is also serving as our interim mayor, so I imagine his schedule is even more hectic than ours.

  “You know me; I’d never say no to the Runside,” I tell Sarah as she scribbles out a honey-do list for me that gets longer by the passing second. All the same, I can’t complain; she’s got a lot more on her plate than I do. Sarah’s not even originally from here, but she’s lived in Seaview Rock for at least fifteen years now and, as a business owner and councilwoman, she’s become a very prominent and respected citizen. Heck, she’s done more for this town in the last two years than most people who have lived here their whole lives.

  Together with Holly and Mr. Casey, they’re making positive changes that are going to ultimately be in the best interest of everyone. Seaview Rock is kind of a town stuck in time; it hasn’t changed much since its inception in the eighteen-fifties, and certain people fought very hard to keep it that way—even to the point of murder.

  Over the last few years, the town has been rocked by scandal, nearly went bankrupt, and then suffered through another affair that saw our very own former mayor charged with killing one of his oldest friends to keep out a megastore in what some of the locals have not-so-affectionately dubbed “Sprawl-Mart-Gate.”

  But with all that behind us, we can finally look toward the future, and I have to say, it looks pretty bright—mostly thanks to Sarah and her cohorts.

  “Here you go,” she hands me the list and gives me a kiss on the cheek (likely to soften the blow).

  I scan it quickly. “No problem. I’ll get started on it… wait a sec, what’s this last thing here? ‘Get pups groomed’?”

  “Yeah, you know: bathed, trimmed, nails clipped, teeth cleaned, the whole nine yards.”

  “Sure, but I can do most of that myself here,” I tell her.

  “All the same, I think we should take them to a professional.”

  “I am a professional!”

  “You know what I mean, Will. They smell like… outside.”

  “They’re dogs,” I counter. “They’re supposed to smell like outside.” Sa
rah has never insisted like this before that I get the dogs groomed; throwing them in our tub has always sufficed. Something is up. “What’s going on here?”

  Sarah smiles and scrunches up her nose, which is her tell that she’s either lying or not telling me the whole truth. “Nothing, I just want them looking their best. New house, new outlook. Call it, um, spring cleaning.”

  “Uh-uh. There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “How about we talk later? I really should get going…”

  “Sarah Jane,” I scold, invoking the all-powerful middle name, “what is it? What’s going on?”

  She rolls her eyes and sighs dramatically. “Fine, okay. If you must know… my mom is coming to visit. Okay, gottagoloveyoubye!” She grabs her purse and practically sprints out the door, leaving me there slack-jawed in disbelief.

  “Sarah, wait! We need to talk about this!” Too late. Her car is already backing down the driveway. Rowdy appears at my side and nudges me with his nose. “I know, buddy. That is messed up.” Suddenly “too much house” isn’t my biggest problem at all.

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  A couple hours later, I sit on a stool at the Runside Bar & Grill, staring into a pint of a Whale of an Ale and occasionally shooting a scowl down to the other end of the bar, where Sarah and Mr. Casey pour over their proposal. Holly, the proprietor of the Runside, flits back and forth between serving patrons and their conversation. That woman was born to multitask.

  “Can I get you anything to eat, Will?” she asks pleasantly.

  “No thanks,” I grumble. “I’m fine for now.”

  After Sarah pulled her confess-and-dash earlier, you’d think I would have had plenty of time to come to terms with it. You’d be wrong. After breathing into a paper bag for about an hour, I decided to come down to the Runside anyway and drown my sorrows… and complain to Sammy, who I texted to meet me.

  The Runside is probably my favorite place in all of Seaview Rock—outside of the Pet Shop Stop, of course. It’s the only place in the world that I can get fresh Atlantic-caught seafood, a home-brewed Whale of an Ale, and a view of the ocean. It’s been around forever, since before the town was even a town, when it was just a fishing settlement before the hatcheries opened here and made Seaview Rock what it is today.

  I feel a hand clap on my shoulder and I spin, startled, to see Sammy’s grinning face. “Sorry, Will. Did I scare you?”

  “No,” I lie. “I was just… very deep in thought.”

  Sammy takes the stool beside me and motions with one hand to Holly. Sam Barstow, also known as Sammy Boy or Sam I Am, is our town’s preeminent barber and my best friend of going on a couple of decades. He’s almost always in his “uniform” of a starched white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and his black hair slicked back off his forehead. Not only is he downright magical with a pair of scissors, but he’s also a wealth of Seaview Rock information, since the only thing that happens in Sammy’s shop more than cutting hair is gossiping.

  “Haven’t seen you around much lately,” he remarks as Holly slides him a Whale of an Ale. “Understandably so, of course.” Sammy is well aware of the fire incident that happened to our rented house and the fallout thereof.

  “Sorry. Been crazy busy with the new place.”

  “I can imagine. Even so, you need to take time for you every now and then.”

  “Yeah,” I mutter as I stare into my glass.

  Sammy frowns. “What gives? You look like you found a bug in your ale.”

  I sigh. “Melinda is coming to town.”

  Sam lets out a low whistle. “Ooh, boy. Yeah, I’d look like you do right now too if I got that news.”

  Melinda, or “Miss Walsh,” as she prefers to be called, is Sarah’s mother. I’ve only met her once when she came to visit for a couple of days more than a year ago now, and there’s a reason we don’t see her very often: she is the most conniving, critical, manipulative person I’ve ever met. And I’ve been in the same room as known murderers plenty of times.

  I know, you’re probably thinking, “She can’t be that bad, Will.” To which I’d say, she once gave me an ultimatum, that either I break off my relationship with Sarah or she would force some sort of accident at the Pet Shop Stop and sue so that I lost everything. Of course, I cleverly averted that potential disaster (I told Sarah on her), and we haven’t spoken since.

  “Why now?” Sammy asks. “If I recall, Melinda left on not-so-good terms with you three.” By “you three” he means me, Sarah, and her younger brother Dennis, who used to be a veritable shut-in that lived with his mother and spent most of his time on the internet. Once Dennis discovered just how awful of a person his mother truly was, he moved here to Seaview Rock and now works part-time for me at the pet store, when he’s not working on his web comic.

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “Sarah kind of ran out on me without an explanation. But I plan to find out.”

  “And then you’ll tell me, right?”

  “Sam, you’re such a gossip.”

  “I prefer to think of myself as ‘well informed.’”

  I chuckle a little. “Enough about me. What’s been up with you? How’s everything?”

  “Everything is good,” he says. “No complaints.”

  You wouldn’t know it just to hear it, but Sam telling me that “everything is good” holds a lot of weight. I know that he’s been spending a lot of time lately with my ex-wife Karen, and even though we’re all friends now, the two of them continue to insist that it’s just friendship and nothing more.

  All the same, it’s been my experience that two people of opposite genders don’t typically spend that much time together and be just friends. And yeah, I’m well aware that it’s really none of my business and I have no place telling either of them anything about it, but… still, you’d think that if it really was anything more, they’d have the decency to tell me.

  “You know,” Sammy says slowly, as if reading my mind, “there is actually something I wanted to talk to you about…”

  Before Sammy gets the chance to say anything further, a young man in a black skullcap drops himself heavily onto the stool to my left and lets out a long, breathy sigh.

  “Hey Dennis.” I look him over. His eyes are wide and he stares straight ahead, as if he’s been traumatized. “You look like you just saw a dead body.”

  “No,” he says. “Worse. Mom’s coming to town.”

  “So I’ve heard.” Sammy and I exchange a glance. Dennis knows firsthand just how awful of a person his mother is. His parents got divorced several years ago, and Melinda manipulated Dennis into thinking she couldn’t handle being alone. He lived with her well into his twenties, and it took a trip here to Seaview Rock to finally snap him out of it and see that he was living the life she wanted for him, and not the one he wanted for himself.

  “What am I going to do?” he asks us. “What do I say to her?”

  “Hold up a sec,” I tell him. “Let’s back up a little. Why is she coming? Did she tell you?”

  Dennis scowls down the bar, same I was doing earlier. “I talked to Mom yesterday. Turns out Sarah invited her.”

  “What? Why on earth would she do that?”

  “I have no idea. Some sense of misplaced empathy, I’m guessing.”

  “When is she coming?” I ask.

  “Sunday,” Dennis tells me glumly. Then he brightens a little and says, “We could make a run for it, Will. If we get in the car now we could be in Canada before Sarah even realizes we’re gone.”

  I nod, trying to look solemn. “Okay, but we’ll need new identities. And we’ll have to develop a taste for poutine.”

  “Easy, considering the alternative.”

  “You two are ridiculous,” Sammy laughs beside us.

  I laugh too; it’s good to be able to poke fun at a bad situation sometimes. All the same, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s going to be a rough couple of days with Melinda
around.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  The next day is Saturday, and for most people that might mean sleeping in or having a lazy day. Not us. That’s okay, though; I’ve never been a heavy sleeper.

  Sarah goes to the Pet Shop Stop to open up for nine a.m., and I set about starting my impressive list of chores. I mow the backyard, I pull some weeds, I clear boxes from the garage so that Sarah can park her car inside, and I make up a guest bed for Melinda.

  Sarah’s meeting the night before at the Runside ran late; I was asleep by the time she got home, so we didn’t get a chance to talk about her mother’s visit or why in the world Sarah invited her back to Seaview Rock. Seems awfully convenient, doesn’t it?

  It doesn’t take me nearly as long as I thought it would to finish my list. Pretty soon I have just one item left: getting the dogs groomed. You’d think that as a pet shop owner I’d know at least one dog groomer, but you’d be wrong. Like I said, I normally just bathe our two at home, and for the shop pups I use the big stainless steel sink in the back of the store.

  But Sarah wants them “professionally” groomed—which leads me to believe that she’s still seeking her mother’s approval, even after all that’s happened between them. Last time Melinda visited, she gave Sarah no end of passive-aggressive grief about her being a pet store employee. Now she’s a co-owner of said pet store, a councilwoman, and a homeowner. Apparently that’s not quite enough; she also needs to have clean, good-smelling dogs.

  I go online and search for dog groomers in my area. There aren’t any in Seaview Rock, but there is one in the neighboring borough of Bridgeton called Any Pet Groomed, so I give them a call.

  After two rings, an enthusiastic young man answers. “Thank you for calling Any Pet Groomed! We groom any pet, any shape, any size. We’ll trim your pups, fluff your cats, and wash your snakes! We’d even polish rhino horns, but that’s illegal in Maine. How can I help you today?”