The Butler Didn't Do It (A Maddox Storm Mystery Book 2)
Read The Butler Didn't Do It (A Maddox Storm Mystery Book 2) Online
Authors: Claire Robyns
The Butler Didn't Do It (A Maddox Storm Cozy Mystery Book 2)
COPYRIGHT
The Butler Didn’t Do It
A Maddox Storm Cozy Mystery (Book 2)
Published by Claire Robyns
Copyright © 2016 by Claire Robyns
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or resold in any form or by any means without permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations for non-commercial uses. To obtain permission to excerpt portions of the text, please contact the author.
All characters in this book are fiction and figments of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to people, living or otherwise, is purely coincidental. If real, names, places and characters are used fictitiously.
Once again Maddox Storm finds herself at the center of a murder, and not the one she artfully arranged.
Desperate to turn Hollow House’s newfound dark fame into a money-making machine, Maddox hosts her first murder mystery weekend. But what starts out as a surprising success is bludgeoned by the all too real death of one of her guests. And worse, now they’re refusing to leave. They came to solve a murder mystery and by gosh, that’s exactly what they intend to do.
Events quickly spiral out of control and before Maddox can say
whodunit
, she’s sharing a house with her soon-to-be-ex husband, the smoky-eyed Detective Nathanial Bishop, a litter of Sherlock Holmes wannabes and a cold-blooded killer.
There’s only one thing to do, really. Roll her sleeves up and solve the murder before the lot of them drive her off the deep end.
PROLOGUE
So here’s a life fact I wish I’d never learnt.
If you catch your husband in the arms of another woman and decide to exact revenge by clearing out his bank account to buy a fifty percent stake in a flailing inn, there’s a good chance he’ll rock up on your doorstep with his bags. Because, you know, he has no money and no place else to go and he
does
own that fifty percent stake right there along with you.
And if you have
goo
for brains and mush for a conscience, you’ll agree to postpone the divorce until he can sort out the sticky mess you made of his finances.
Which could take a while.
Hollow House has had no paying guests this year. Except for the Limlys, but I figure they don’t count since Principal Limly turned out to be a psychotic murderer who’d only stayed the night so he could search through the room of the woman he’d killed. Plus, he’d ended up kidnapping me and I very nearly ended up his third victim.
Oh, and then cheating scumbag husband (aka Joseph McMurphy) releases his first crime thriller and his publisher goes wild promoting the fantasy of the author who actually lives in a death house/inn.
That story splashed the headlines, was even picked up by a couple of news satellites. Needless to say, Joe’s book was selling like hotcakes, which would really help our financial situation—in another six months or so, when he got his first royalty check.
So I was stuck living under the same roof as Joe until he could shift our shares in Hollow House and that wasn’t going to happen unless we turned the house of horrors into a profitable business.
What’s a girl to do?
ONE
“This is going to be so much fun,” Jenna exclaimed, her summery blue eyes alight with excitement. “A murder mystery weekend!”
“Well, you know what Nana Rose always says.” I wiggled my brows at her. “When life throws you lemons—”
“—suck on it?” Jenna drawled.
“She only said that the one time.”
“To me,” Jenna said, sounding so indignant I couldn’t help barking out a laugh.
“To be fair,” I said, “you’d spent the whole week dragging your feet around and sulking.”
“I was heartbroken.”
I rolled my eyes. “
You
dumped
Jason.
”
“I was thirteen,” Jenna grumbled. “How was I supposed to know what I wanted? Thirteen’s a very confusing age.”
“Yeah, poor Jason was very confused indeed, especially when he took you back and got dumped the second time around.”
“Oh, come now.” She waved me off. “He was miserable after we hooked up again. I did him a favor, seriously.”
“And I believe you, but only because you’re my very best friend in the whole world.” I chuckled, lowering my gaze to my plate and using my fork to hunt through scraps of lettuce for a piece of chicken I might have missed. “You’re still happy to play the victim next weekend?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve always wanted to die. Listen to this, I’ve been practicing.” Jenna made a choking noise that sounded like, well, like nothing I’d ever heard before.
I glanced around discretely, and of course we’d attracted the stares of everyone within earshot.
“Jenna,” I hissed beneath my breath, “you do know you’re not actually going to die, right?”
“I should hope not,” she said with a laugh.
“No, I mean your murder won’t be witnessed.” I searched her face, not sure what this was really about.
I was the actress, after all, if that’s what you could call my almost-not-there stint on Broadway as understudy to Chintilly Swan. The same Chintilly Swan, might I add, that I’d last seen wrapped around my soon-to-be-ex husband. Jenna, on the other hand, didn’t have a dramatic bone in her slender body and, so far as I knew, had never wanted one.
“You’ll be stone cold dead by the time anyone finds you,” I reminded Jenna. “So there’s not actually a death scene.”
She gave me a wide smile. “You and Joe will be there.”
“Lucky us,” I groaned.
“Underpaid and under-appreciated,” Jenna grumbled.
“Not paid at all and wildly appreciated,” I countered, raising my glass of wine to her.
She reached for her glass and clinked mine. “Speaking of dosh, have you had any more bookings?”
“No, still only Miss Crawley, but I haven’t advertised anywhere except for the announcement on our website,” I sighed. “I wanted to keep it small for the first weekend, like a dry run, you know? But I was hoping to fill more than one room.”
Jenna laughed. “Don’t worry, Miss Crawley will be more than a handful. You’ll feel like you’ve had a full house by the end of the weekend.”
I joined in the laughter, although goodness knows why. Miss Crawley was a self-proclaimed spinster, a self-appointed arbiter of propriety and the town crier. She’d single-handedly brought the Silver Firs gossip mill into the digital era with her social media outlets and Sunday digest roundups.
All in all, Miss Crawley was no laughing matter and I’d have the joy of her company for an entire weekend without, it would seem, any other houseguests to dilute the pleasure.
Jenna’s laughter faded as she stared over my shoulder. “Huh.”
I turned in my seat to take a look. The Seafood Grille & Bar, known as Seefies to us locals, was the place to be any night of the week. The food was excellent and the view was magical. We’d managed to snag a table on the canopied deck on the boardwalk and the lake was as smooth as glass tonight. The moon and stars above reflected like dancing ice fairies and across the lake, the
Lakeview Spa Retreat
glittered like a diamond tiara crowning the far shore.
The place was packed, especially out here on the deck, but my eye immediately caught the couple who’d just strolled up on the boardwalk. Peter Ottenburgh and the woman hanging on his arm, Candy or Candra or something like that. More importantly, the woman he’d left his wife for and now I knew why.
Candy was pregnant. About nine months pregnant from the size of her bump.
“She looks like she’s about to pop,” I exclaimed.
“Looks like it,” Jenna murmured.
I raised a brow at Jenna. “Did you know?”
She threw her hands up. “Hey, I didn’t even know they’d gotten hitched.”
“They’re married?”
“Unless Peter is wearing his old wedding band, which I doubt considering the state of Sandra.”
Sandra, that was it.
I gave the couple another glance and sure enough, there was a band on his ring finger.
“She doesn’t come into town much,” Jenna went on. “Actually, I haven’t seen her in months.”
“Before she began to show?” I murmured, turning back to face Jenna across the table. “A secret wedding and a secret pregnancy. Hmm…”
“Maybe he was trying to spare Heather. I mean, look at her. Sandra must have fallen pregnant before the ink dried on his divorce papers.”
They’d been the golden couple, Heather and Peter. A few years above us at school, both of them blonde and beautiful and totally devoted to each other. They’d gotten married straight out of school, attended university together, and then they’d settled down on the Ottenburgh wine estate to enjoy their prosperous future. Until last year, of course, when the divorce had been announced and Sandra had suddenly appeared in the picture.
“Poor Heather,” I sighed. “If she doesn’t already know, the news is going to hit her hard and it will be all over town by morning.”
“It’s probably for the best,” Jenna said, lifting her wine glass to her lips. “At least she can move on with the rest of her life now.”
I read between the lines and bit down on my lower lip. “I’ve moved on.”
“Your ex-husband lives two doors down the hallway from you.”
“Joe isn’t my ex
yet
.”
“And there’s my point.”
I scowled at my best friend, who could sometimes be a real stick in my ass. “You know why I stalled the divorce proceedings.”
“Because Joe said pretty please?”
“No! That’s not… I felt…” I glared at her, grabbed my own glass of wine and drained it. “It’s not exactly a party over at Hollow House right now, you know. I could use some moral support.”
“I’m on your side, Maddie Mads, one hundred percent.” Jenna reached over to clasp my hand. “That’s why I’m worried. This situation with Joe isn’t healthy. Unless you’re considering a reunion…?”
“No thanks.” I shuddered. “I don’t do threesomes.”
Jenna pulled a face. “He’s still seeing Chintilly?”
“Don’t know and don’t care,” I said, and almost meant it. “But she’d always be there, sharing a bed with us regardless.”
Jenna sipped on her wine, studying me for a long moment before she said slowly, softly, “You do realize this whole pleading poverty thing is a just an angle? Joe is playing you.”
“How?”
“To stay close so he can win you back.”
“That’s ridiculous. We’re barely civil to each other.” I shook my head emphatically. “He really is penniless.”
“The guy’s a bestselling author.”
“But he won’t see a royalty check for at least six months.”
“He can walk into any bank and get an instant loan,” Jenna said. “No questions asked.”
“His Uncle Markus raised him to be wary of credit,” I said. “Joe’s never even owned a charge card.”
The look in Jenna’s eye grew more skeptical by the second. “And he doesn’t want to move in with this uncle because he doesn’t want to admit that he lost all his money.”
“I lost all his money,” I corrected. “Joe doesn’t want to rat me out to Uncle Markus.”
“Your husband’s a regular hero.”
“My soon-to-be-ex husband, you mean, and God, that’s such a mouthful. I seriously need a good acronym.” I reached for the bottle in the wine cooler as I thought about it. “STB-ex. How does that sound?”
Jenna wrinkled her nose. “Like a venereal disease.”