Damsel in a Dress by Kirsten Weiss

Author:Kirsten Weiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cozy mystery, paranormal mystery, female detective, amateur detective, woman sleuth, funny, murder, killing, crime
Publisher: Kirsten Weiss
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

eighteen

Shaken, I set the bag of burgers on the counter beside Bugsy.

“Why d’you look like you saw a ghost?” Leo looked up from his thick statistics tome. “And after last night, I know what you seeing a ghost looks like.”

The chihuahua sniffed the greasy bag.

GD, tail lashing, leapt from the haunted rocking chair and prowled toward us.

“Worse than a ghost,” I said. “Much, much worse.”

“A vampire? A flesh-eating zombie? Herb?”

“Worse. And Herb’s not bad.”

My assistant reached into the bag. He drew out a burger, checked the label, nodded. “He’s had Dion Fortune’s scrying mirror for over a year, and he can’t unload it. Ever wonder why? The thing’s got to be a portal to a horror dimension or something if no one wants to touch it.”

“That...” I cocked my head. “That is actually an interesting point.” If ghosts were real, I was going to have to reorder my entire personal cosmology. Could there be alternate dimensions?

No. No way. I could only handle one half-way shattered belief at a time.

Leo unwrapped his burger and paused with it halfway to his mouth. “Wait a minute. No one died, did they? You were only gone thirty minutes.”

“No. But thanks for the thought. I had a run-in with Laurel.”

“Ouch.” Leo fed the dog a crumb of meat “Does Jason know?”

I sighed and pulled my phone from my jean pocket. “Not yet.” I wandered to the bookcase door for some privacy, dialed Jason, and pretended to study the spines. And I wasn’t calling to confess that his partner had run me out of the bookstore.

“Hey,” he rumbled. “You really can’t stay away from me.”

“Meh...”

He laughed. “What’s up?”

“Did you find anything in the police archives about Leigh Ann Borcher?”

“Yeah,” he said.

GD prowled behind the counter. Ha. If he was looking to torment Bugsy, the dog was safely on top of the glass and under Leo’s watchful gaze.

I ran my fingers along a row of fake spines. Yikes. These needed dusting. “And?” I prompted.

“She went missing and was declared dead.”

A sickening knot blocked my throat. “Missing?” The Historical Association hadn’t mentioned that. “When’d she go missing?”

“The day before her marriage to Thomas Finknotter. The weird thing is, there’s no sign he was ever a suspect, and he should have been. But he came from a wealthy farming family that had lots of pull at the time.”

Suspect? Murder suspect? Could this day get any worse? I remembered that figure in the church and swallowed. “Does he turn up anywhere else in the archives?”

“No. He married another woman a year later and died in 1987. No children. His wife passed away a year later.”

A trio of guests migrating into the Fortune Telling Room shot me curious glances.

“And there were no clues to Leigh Ann’s disappearance?” I asked.

“Her family reported her missing. Two weeks later, the case was closed and she was declared dead.”

“Wait—two weeks? Don’t people have to be missing for years before they’re declared dead?”

“Usually. But these are old records, and things go missing. The police may have had real evidence that she was dead, like a body, and I just don’t have the files.

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