Murder at Midnight (Witches of Keyhole Lake)
Table of Contents
Murder at Midnight (Witches of Keyhole Lake)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
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
Thank you!
Haunted Pendant
© 2021 Tegan Maher
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system currently in use or yet to be devised.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or institutions is entirely coincidental.
This eBook is licensed for your personal use and may not be re-sold or given away to others. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase a copy for that person. If you did not purchase this book, or it was not purchased for your use, then you have an unauthorized copy. Please go to your favorite eBook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting my hard work and copyright.
Chapter 1
“More tea, Noelle?”
“Yes, please,” I replied, smiling and pushing my glass toward my friend Kristen. She’d started working at Bobbie Sue’s a couple months ago, and it was nice to see her happy. She’d been miserable at her previous job, and it had taken a toll.
“There ya go,” she said, then topped Hunter’s off, too. “Y’all need anything else?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Just the check. I want a piece of cheesecake, but if I have it, I’ll be worthless for the next three hours.”
“Yeah, but it’d be worth it,” she said, smiling as she strolled off. She wasn’t wrong. Bobbie Sue had the best strawberry cheesecake in town.
“Are you gonna eat that?” Hunter, my fiancé, asked, motioning toward the last piece of garlic toast remaining on the plate between us.
“All yours,” I replied. “What’s on your agenda for the rest of the afternoon?”
He sighed. “I have a meeting with the city council. It seems we have a land battle brewing.”
I laughed, trying to imagine what that would entail in a town as small as Keyhole Lake. “Do tell.”
Hunter rolled his brown eyes. “The Grady’s are remortgaging their farm, and the bank required a land survey before they’d approve it. It seems the fence that separates their property from the Barker’s on the north side is ten feet into their property, and now they want to move it. The Barkers have cattle and say that fence line’s been there since the properties were split back in the thirties and say the surveyor’s wrong.”
“That’ll be fun,” I said, brows raised. Fenceline disputes were the stuff hundred-year feuds were made of, but I wasn’t sure why he was worried about it. “But what’s it got to do with you? That doesn’t sound like an issue for law enforcement.”
Hunter was the sheriff but often got dragged into petty disputes because somebody would end up doing something spiteful that required a clear head and the threat of handcuffs.
He scowled as he sopped up the last of the juices from his barbecue and baked beans with the toast. “It’s crazy. Abram Grady wants me to serve them with an eviction notice and seems to think I’m not taking it seriously enough. Thus the town council.” He sighed. “I need to resolve it before it gets out of hand, though, Yesterday, Birdie Grady and Thelma Barker nearly came to blows in the produce section at the Piggly Wiggly. It’s getting ugly.”
I paused, brow raised, then grinned at how far he’d come since he was a city-boy transplant out of his depth in the tiny Southern puddle he’d moved to. “Have fun with that. I’m gonna pop in on Erol then go home and lay by the pool before the girls and I go out tonight.”
“Maybe I’ll be done with the meeting in time to hang out with you for a bit. A beer by the pool sounds amazing.” He slid to the end of the booth to stand but pulled back as a familiar woman plowed past us down the aisle.
Miranda, a barmaid at my favorite dive bar, was a woman on a mission, and I was glad I wasn’t the one at the end of her trip. She stopped beside a two-top where a middle-aged woman was having lunch with a balding man in a fancy suit and slammed her hands on her hips.
“Barbie Lee Phillips! How dare you sit here munchin’ ribs and suckin’ down iced tea while me and my kids are roastin’ to death in that dump of an apartment! It’s been three days!”
The woman shrank back in her booth and flapped her gums like a guppy, apparently unable to find an acceptable answer in the face of the hundred-and-thirty pounds of rage glaring down at her.
“I ... I sent Wes over there yesterday,” she stuttered, her round cheeks flushed. She was having a hard time looking Miranda in the eye.
Miranda drew her brows down. “Yeah, and he spent an entire five minutes looking at the thermostat before he told me it was beyond him and that he’d tell you to call a professional.”
“Well ... I’ve been busy,” Barbie Lee said, her hand fluttering to her throat.
“You’re gonna be busy diggin’ those rib bones out of places the sun don’t shine if you don’t call me an AC guy right now and have him to my place today.” Miranda huffed a black curl off her face and wiped her forehead with her wrist. “This is bull and you know it. I pay too much in rent to sit in a sauna when it’s eighty degrees outside.”
She crossed her arms and tapped her foot, waiting for Barbie to answer.
The guy who was having lunch with Barbie Lee shifted his weight and glanced back and forth between the two women. “Maybe I should go—”
“No, no,” Barbie Lee said, flapping her hand at him. “You just sit tight.” She turned to Miranda, her nose upturned. “I’ll see what I can do, but it’s inappropriate of you to approach me while I’m with a client. There are channels you need to go through. I’ll be sure to mention it to Mr. Struthers.”
Miranda’s face mottled and I couldn’t help but think that while Barbie Lee may have found her spine, she’d lost her ever-lovin’ mind. My thoughts were solidified when an image of Barbie Lee lying on the ground at Miranda’s pink-Nike-clad feet, crossed through my mind so vividly that I gasped and threw up my mental shields. Since a year or so before, I’d experienced random flashes of other people’s thoughts. It was never welcome, and sometimes it was downright uncomfortable. This was one of those times. I shook my head and wondered if Barbie Lee’s survival instincts were ever gonna kick in.
“You do that,” Miranda said with slitted eyes. “And while you’re at it, be sure to tell him you’re not takin’ care of his property, either. Today, Barbie Lee.” She wagged her finger back and forth between herself and the realtor. “Have somebody there by five, or you and me are gonna go ’round.”
She turned on her heel and stomped back up the aisle past us and out the front door. I took a drink of my tea and waited to see what Barbie would do. If she had half a brain in her head, she’d whip out her phone and get an AC guy to Miranda’s post haste.
That’s not what she did.
Clearing her throat, she pasted a sticky-sweet smile on her overly made-up face. “Tenants. What can you do? They expect everything done right now. They simply don’t understand that my world doesn’t revolve around them.”
The man tilted his head. “Doesn’t it, though? You’re th
e property manager, are you not?”
Barbie Lee gave a nervous laugh. “Well, yes, but AC repairmen aren’t easy to reach and schedule. It can’t just happen at the snap of her fingers.”
“I beg to differ. I believe our conversation is at an end. I don’t think you’d be a good fit for my properties.” With that, he drained his coffee and stood. “Good day, Ms. Phillips. May I suggest you call a repairman? I don’t believe that young lady was jesting when she gave you ‘til the end of the day. I know I wouldn’t have been.”
He caught Kristen on his way out and handed her some cash. “I believe that should cover it and your tip. Thank you for your service.”
Kristen thanked him, then counted before he was out the door. I knew from experience that you never just took a customer at his word in that situation unless you were willing to cover the rest of the check yourself at the end of the night.
“Thank you!” she called after him with a big smile on her face. “You have a good day.”
Barbie gathered her purse and left right behind him without uttering so much as a goodbye.
“Phew,” Kristen said, sliding into the booth beside me. “I’m glad he paid the check instead of her. She always leaves two dollars no matter how big the bill is, and she’s one of those people who run you ragged.”
“Who is she?” Hunter asked, sliding back into the booth and watching through the plate-glass window as she climbed into a late-model Audi.
“That’s Barbie Lee Phillips, local slum lord and old-biddy extraordinaire,” she replied. “She manages the apartments over on East Main and the ones out by the Walmart, at least if you want to call what she does managing. All of her tenants hate her. You’d think all the repairs come directly out of her pocket. My friend leases an apartment at one of her properties and had to use her guest bath for over a month because the toilet was clogged in her master and would come up in the shower whenever she flushed.”
I crinkled my nose, grateful that I owned the farm and didn’t have to depend on somebody else to fix things that broke. “That’s horrible.”
Kristen nodded. “It is, and it’s not like she has an option. She’s locked into the lease for another nine months, and even then, it’s not easy to find a place around here. All the decent ones go at the snap of a finger when they come open.”
Considering she’d recently been in the market, I knew she understood the situation. “How many kids does she have?”
“Just two, and they’re teenagers, but still,” she replied. “I get that it’s not always possible to get a repairman somewhere in a day, but Barbie doesn’t even try unless the tenant comes down on her like a ton of bricks. And there are many who aren’t good at that and just deal with it rather than call her on it.”
I smiled because I knew Miranda from Fancy’s. I’d seen her get in the face of grown men when they weren’t minding their manners. One gutless middle-aged realtor didn’t stand a chance.
“Are you coming to girl’s night tonight?” I asked as I pulled a few bills from my wallet and handed them to her. “I know you said you had to see how tired you were when you got off, but I think it would be good for you. You’ve been working your butt off lately and are due some downtime.”
Since she’d moved into the apartment at the farm, she’d taken it upon herself to do all the feeding and barn work even when it wasn’t her turn. I’d had to go out of my way to get to it before she did because I only expected her to do her share, not mine and Gabi’s, too. I figured she’d settle into a routine and get tired of that eventually.
“Yeah,” she replied, smiling as she tucked a hank of blond hair that had worked loose from her ponytail behind her ear. “I am. I need to blow off some steam and just chill out for a while.”
“You need to stop doing all the chores,” Hunter said, brows raised. “There are four of us, you know.”
“I know,” she replied, rising to greet a group of four that walked through the door. “I just feel like I owe you guys for being so good to me.”
“You did me a favor, too,” I told her as she stood. “Now I don’t have some weirdo stranger in the apartment that I need to keep an eye on. I’ll see you tonight.”
“See you then,” she said, grinning as she walked away.
I’d rented her the apartment above the barn when she’d lost her place and had nowhere to go. I benefitted, too, because I’d been dreading putting an ad in the paper when Matt, my friend and previous tenant, had moved in with Anna Mae, a woman who was like a sister to me. They’d recently had a baby and were planning their wedding. I was happy for them but a little sad because it felt like an era had come to an end when he’d moved out and my little sister Shelby had gone to college. I didn’t do well with change even if it was good, and my world had felt off-kilter for several months while I’d adjusted.
I was mostly okay now, though, thanks to having such a great support system. I still missed Shelby, and coffee in the morning without Matt wasn’t quite the same, but I was settling into my new normal.
Hunter put his hand over mine and gave a little squeeze. I didn’t know how, but the man always seemed to know what I was thinking. That meant he also hadn’t been pressing me to set a date for our wedding because he knew that just moving in together had been a big adjustment for me. I smiled at him, grateful that he got it. I really was the luckiest girl alive to have found such a great guy.
Bobbie Sue, a middle-aged redheaded fireball that I was proud to call my friend and godmother, pushed through the batwing doors leading from the kitchen carrying a slice of cheesecake topped with fresh strawberries. She snagged two forks from the waitress station as she passed through it, then set the plate between Hunter and me and slid into the booth beside me.
“Hey!” I said, smiling at her as I scooped up the fork and dug into the strawberry-topped delight. I hadn’t ordered it, but fate had decided to reward me anyway. “What’s up? You’re still going out with us, right?”
“Absolutely,” she replied. “I need a break. This place has been nonstop for the last week. I don’t know what’s gotten into people, but apparently, the entire town’s gotten a craving for barbecue.’
I gave her a half-smile. “Great for the bank account, but not so much for the sanity. Anna Mae’s coming out for the first time since she had the baby, so I’m torqued.”
“Sandra’s coming down for a visit next weekend for our birthday, so I’m getting my relaxation in now. I’ll be spending the rest of the week cleanin’ and tidyin’ the yard. It’s a mess because I haven’t done anything with it since winter.”
I huffed a disbelieving breath out through my nose because Bobbie Sue’s idea of a mess was my house at its cleanest. You could see yourself in every reflective surface in her house. “Yeah, I’m sure it’s a hot mess. What, is there a fingerprint on the toaster? A smudge on the bathroom mirror?”
She waved me off. “Now you’re just makin’ fun of me. Her house is always spotless.”
Hunter raised a brow at her. “She also doesn’t have a pre-teen son running rampant through her place. Cut yourself some slack before you have a stroke. She’s not coming to see the house; she’s coming to spend time with family.”
Bobbie Sue had been adopted as a baby and had only recently reunited with her twin sister. It had been a confusing situation because I’d seen Sandra around town a few times and had mistaken her for Bobbie Sue. Now that they’d reconnected, though, they spent as much time together as possible considering they lived in different states.
“That’s what Earl says, too,” she replied. Earl was her husband and the man behind the barbecue. Until the last year or so, you couldn’t have walked into the restaurant’s kitchen and not seen him manning the grill. Since they’d adopted their son Justin, though, they’d both been trying to work less.
“Well, he’s right,” I replied, dragging a forkful of cheesecake through the strawberry sauce on the plate. “Relax and enjoy her visit. It’s your birthday, not a house inspection.”
>
She sighed. “You’re right. So what was the ruckus out here a few minutes ago? I heard something, but by the time I got the coleslaw washed off my hands, the place was empty.”
Kristen slid in beside Hunter and snatched a stray fry off his plate. “Miranda from Fancy’s gave Barbie Lee an earful because her AC’s been out for three days and Barbie was sittin’ in here stuffin’ her face and schmoozin’ a potential client instead of getting it fixed.”
Bobbie Sue shook her head. “That woman. I tell ya, one of these days, she’s gonna get hers.”
I nodded in agreement as I smashed the last bits of graham cracker crust with my fork then licked it. “And if she doesn’t get an AC guy to Miranda’s today, I know who’s gonna give it to her.”
Chapter 2
I’d no sooner climbed in my truck than my phone rang, and Anna Mae’s name flashed across the screen.
“Hey!” I said, starting the truck and kicking on the AC. “What’s up? You better not be callin’ to cancel tonight. You’re comin’ if I have to come drag you out myself.”
She laughed. “Believe me, I’m not turning down an evening of talking to people with actual verbal skills. I love that baby, but man am I ready to take a night off. That’s sort of what I’m callin’ about. Matt’s off tomorrow, so he said he’d watch Amelia if we want to go to a couple sales. I’m getting low on stock here since we haven’t been able to go to any for a few weeks, and I figured you probably are, too.”
“I am. I was just thinkin’ that this morning. Have you already found some?” Since we both ran shops that required used items, we spent a lot of time going to estate sales and auctions. Sometimes we’d even take a day and just go yard-saling. A lot of that was for fun, but you’d be surprised what gems you could find if you were willing to dig through old knickknacks, VHS tapes, and old like-new exercise equipment.
Anna Mae’s shop, Things Remembered, sold antiques and vintage clothing, so we shopped for different inventory. Since I gave old things a new purpose, I was okay with finding pieces that weren’t in the best of shape.