Specters and Sage by Corina Woolsey

Author:Corina Woolsey [Woolsey, Corina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Summer Prescott Books
Published: 2020-04-29T22:00:00+00:00

I know what you’ve been doing.

Cha-ching!

If you don’t want the authorities finding out, prepare $2000.

Instructions will be sent soon.

Xoxo

Chapter Eight

“I’m so confused,” groaned Stephen from the passenger seat of Janine’s car. “Don’t you need to own expensive stuff in order to be blackmailed?”

“Supposedly,” Janine said, distractedly. They were still parked in the driveway of Stephen’s former house as she flipped through the stack of papers she had pulled from the envelope.

In form, each message was identical. They were all written in different colored crayons, each sloppily done, and all saying variations on the same theme. No two had exactly the same words, but they all paraphrased the same idea: “give me money, or I go to the authorities.” So far, Janine had failed to find anything particularly remarkable about them at all. Aside from a rather unique way of writing the letter ‘I’- adding a line through the middle that made it look somewhat like an E held up against a mirror- there was nothing identifiable about any of them.

“The handwriting is terrible,” Janine said.

“They probably used their non-dominant hand,” Stephen said. “I think Allison made me watch a documentary once, and they said people would use their other hand so that their handwriting couldn’t be identified.” Janine gritted her teeth. That he remembered.

“What could somebody be blackmailing you for?” she asked. “What did you do?”

Stephen thought for a moment. “I always forgot to recycle.”

Janine rolled her eyes. “Well it would be helpful to know. If we knew why someone would blackmail you, then we could probably figure out who.”

“Because you think they killed me?”

“Maybe things went bad when you wouldn’t pay,” Janine said. Stephen looked unsure. “It’s something. Shady things lead to other shady things.” She shrugged and sighed. “I’m a chef, not a detective. Cut me a break.”

She stared down at the little stack of paper in her hands. Something wasn’t adding up with her theory. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t identify just what it was. It was as though the harder she thought about it, the further away she got from the answer. It wasn’t a completely unique experience to her. This kind of thing often happened when she was crafting new recipes. A meal would be missing some spice or ingredient, and she would keep tasting and tasting until there was nearly nothing of the food left. In those cases, she had learned that the solution was to do something else for a while. The answer would always come while she was watching television, or playing checkers with Lawrence, or even a couple of times in the middle of the night when she had sat bolt upright in bed and scared the heck out of Joe with a shouted “coriander!”

The difference was that this time they were on a serious time limit. There wasn’t time for checkers or television. So whatever she chose to do, it had to be murder-related.

“All right,” she said with the kind of determination a game show contestant gets when they blindly pick Door #3.

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